Lai Xiaomin, the former Party Secretary and Chairman of China Huarong Asset Management Corporation, was sentenced to death for corruption and bribery, which has attracted rare attention in mainland China.
However, Lai Xiaomin is the second mainland official to be sentenced to death for a huge amount of corruption, and I’m afraid it’s not easy to change the stereotype of “deathless corruption”.
Born in the poor countryside of Ruijin County, Jiangxi Province, Lai Xiaomin’s parents were poor families doing small business and raising pigs, and he claimed that when he was a child, his family’s annual income was only 13 yuan, which was lower than the income of 15 yuan for poor families, and was classified as a special hardship case. He did well in his studies since childhood and met the Cultural Revolution in middle school. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, he enrolled in the Jiangxi Finance and Economics College and joined the People’s Bank of China after graduation. He was sentenced to death in 2018 after an investigation and trial of nearly 2 years.
Lai Xiaomin was convicted of 3 crimes: bribery with a death sentence, embezzlement with 11 years of imprisonment, and bigamy with 1 year, and the court decided to execute him and confiscate all his personal property. His embezzlement and bribery amounted to 1.788 billion RMB (about 8 billion NTD). The proceeds of his bribery were paid to the state treasury, while the proceeds of embezzlement were returned to the victim’s unit.
Some media said that Lai Xiaomin was the first corrupt official to be sentenced to death since the 18th National Congress, but this information is wrong. Before him, two corrupt officials were sentenced to death: Zhao Liping, vice chairman of the Inner Mongolia Political Consultative Conference, and Zhang Zhongsheng, former vice mayor of Luliang, Shanxi province. But while the former was also corrupt but was sentenced to death for intentional homicide, the latter embezzled a whopping 1.04 billion yuan and was sentenced to death in 2019.
The embezzlement case of Lai Xiaomin, former chairman of China Huarong Assets Corporation, is the most high-profile anti-corruption case recently, and his alleged 100 mistresses and 100 properties have become the focus of discussion among netizens.
The mainland court pointed out that Lai Xiaomin provided significant criminal clues to his subordinates and was verified to be true, which is a significant meritorious performance, but the facts, nature and seriousness of the circumstances of the bribery he committed are not enough for a lenient punishment, and he was still sentenced to death.
The official investigation pointed out that among the 22 identified cases of bribery, three of them involved bribes of 200 million, 400 million and 600 million yuan (900 million, 1.8 billion and 2.7 billion yuan) respectively, and six others involved bribes of 40 million yuan (180 million yuan) or more, which is a staggering amount of bribes received.
However, Lai Xiaomin was not sentenced to death for several crimes that amounted to more than the previous officials who took huge amounts of bribes, thus leaving the impression of “immortality” to the outside world. Among them, the largest amount of Tianjin Public Security Director Wu Changshun crime amounted to 7.4 billion yuan, but the embezzlement part is only 400 million yuan, the rest is embezzlement of public funds and assist family members in business profits; the former Hainan Huayin International Trust Chairman Shi Xue embezzlement of 4.18 billion yuan, sentenced to death, but suspended execution; the former Bank of China Guangdong Kaiping Branch Governor Yu Zhendong embezzlement of U.S. bank funds totaling 4 billion yuan The former vice president of Hainan High Court, Zhang Jiahui, who claimed to have a fortune of 20 billion RMB, was actually found to have taken 43.75 million RMB in bribes, and she was sentenced to 18 years in prison and fined 4 million RMB.
According to this observation, the actual number of corrupt officials sentenced to death is indeed very small, and it also includes the amount of corruption found by the court and the amount of bribery or property rumored to be a small gap, so the outside world will think that “the giant corruption does not die. The reason why the mainland cares about the death of the giant corruption, mainly because the crime of corruption to the amount of crime sentencing, many corrupt officials fall, the amount of crime before the investigation will be exaggerated by the Internet and the media, and strengthen the impression that the sentence and the amount of corruption does not match the proportion. Of course, the mainland will have some judicial officials in the trial of the case to take bribes and light sentences, but also in the general public expected.
In addition to the amount of money embezzled, what attracted the attention of the public was the more than 100 mistresses and more than 100 properties, two things that many people in the mainland consider to be symbols of male success, and which were brought to full play in the case of Lai Xiaomin. The rumors of his fall were that dozens of his more than 100 mistresses came from within the Huarong company he headed and its subsidiaries, and that the mistresses not only held important positions, but were also given properties in a community, which led to rumors on the Internet that “children in a community call Lai Xiaomin their father”; some of the mistresses were well-known actors and actresses, and many of the actresses named on the Internet publicly denied this. The netizens familiar with the situation also pointed out that Lai Xiaomin used a large number of relatives and fellow countrymen in the Huarong company, and whenever the company had a gathering of Jiangxi fellow countrymen, half of the people dining in the canteen would be missing.
Lai Xiaomin’s properties are said to be 120, not including those he gave to his 100 mistresses.
In addition to the large amount of cash in Lai Xiaomin’s stash of properties in Beijing, there are also a sizable number of watches, gold bars and paintings.
In addition to a large number of mistresses and properties, another must for most corrupt officials on the mainland is a large amount of cash. According to the Chinese Communist Party’s Commission for Discipline Inspection, all placed in Beijing specifically for hiding money in the property, the amount of up to 270 million yuan, weighing up to 3 tons. As for whether the count burned out more than one money counting machine, the media may be too old for such a stunt and did not elaborate much. The official media also added some new elements to the case, including dozens of watches and luxury cars owned by Lai Xiaomin, but these luxury cars and watches, like cash, he was afraid to use for fear of being too flashy.
Several heads of state-owned and private enterprises that have been investigated in recent years are also rumored to have collaborated with Lai, such as Wu Xiaohui, the founder of Anbang Insurance, Xiao Jianhua, the de facto controller of the Tomorrow family, and Ye Jianming, the chairman of the board of directors of Huarong, who all hold shares in Huarong and have business dealings with it.
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