Ex-official sentenced to life in China’s biggest banking scandal

By Riyaz ul Khaliq

ISTANBUL (AA) – A court in China sentenced to life a former official in the country’s biggest-ever banking corruption scandal.

A top former bank official, Xu Guojun, was convicted Wednesday on charges of “embezzlement and misappropriation” of public funds by the Jiangmen Intermediate People’s Court in the southeast coastal province of Guangdong.

The corruption case involved over $483 million between 1993 and 2001.

It is the biggest-ever corruption case in China’s banking sector, according to a report by the daily South China Morning on Thursday.

“The amount of their embezzlement is particularly large,” the court said. “They have caused particularly significant damage to the interests of the state and the people.”

The convicted is a former head of a Bank of China branch in Kaiping, part of the city of Jiangmen.

He was extradited from the US in 2021, after being on the run for 20 years.

The court noted Xu and his accomplices “had embezzled more than 900 million yuan ($125.4 million) in US dollars, Hong Kong dollars and German marks.”