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Monday, August 19, 2019, 11:56
Net widens in fight against corruption
By Zhang Yan
Monday, August 19, 2019, 11:56 By Zhang Yan

China makes major gains in capturing economic fugitives, confiscating their ill-gotten funds 

Liu Baofeng, one of China’s most-wanted fugitives, returned home in June after turning himself in. Liu, 53, a former senior securities manager in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, is accused of corruption and embezzling 70 million yuan (US$10.14 million). He returned after 18 years on the run in Canada. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY BY GUANGDONG PROVINCIAL COMMISSION OF SUPERVISION)

Yang Xiuzhu, a prisoner in Zhejiang province, said people could never imagine the bitterness and loneliness she experienced as a fugitive on the run overseas.

Yang, 72, former deputy mayor of Wenzhou, Zhejiang, fled the country in 2003, accused of corruption and embezzling about 250 million yuan (US$36.3 million) for personal use.

In 2015, she was No 1 on the list of China’s top 100 corruption suspects for whom red notices had been issued by Interpol, and returned to China to plead guilty in November 2016. A red notice is a request by a country for the detention and extradition of an individual for whom that nation has issued an arrest warrant.

“The environment outside the Chinese mainland was strange, and the loneliness was overwhelming,” Yang said.

She worked in Chinese restaurants in order to talk with the waiters in her native Wenzhou dialect. “I just wanted to find a place to speak Chinese,” she said.

She left the mainland for Hong Kong, and then went to Singapore, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Canada and the United States.

Yang sought refuge in the Netherlands, where she stayed for 11 years. However, Dutch police detained her in 2014 for illegal immigration, but she managed to flee to Canada by using a fake identity and passport. She then took a train to the United States, where she was detained for using fake documents, but she filed an appeal and sought asylum there.

While she was in the Netherlands, Yang accidentally injured herself. “I took painkillers for a month, but was still in agony. A family doctor then asked me to go to the hospital for an X-ray, and it showed I had a broken rib and that a new rib had grown into the old one in just a month,” she said.

While she was detained in the US, she developed a cataract, and was transferred to another prison. “I felt helpless and desperate, so I finally decided to come home,” Yang said.

In October 2017, after being convicted of embezzlement and bribery, she was sentenced to eight years in prison and fined 800,000 yuan by Zhejiang Provincial Intermediate People’s Court.

Referring to other fugitives, Yang said, “Their only choice is to come back and seek lenient punishment, rather than living anxiously in hiding.”

She is one of the 6,000 economic fugitives who have been extradited, repatriated or persuaded to return home to face trial from more than 120 countries and regions since 2014, when China launched the Operation Skynet campaign to target fugitives and seize their ill-gotten assets.

Chinese anti-graft officers have confiscated and returned a total of 4.7 billion yuan in so-called dirty money from abroad, according to the National Supervisory Commission.

Great progress

In the past five years, the nation has made great progress in seizing fugitives and returning their illicit assets. Anti-graft authorities have extended their supervision to focus on public officials, directors of State-owned companies and financial institutions to prevent them from being corrupted and fleeing overseas.

“Under the leadership of the CPC Central Committee, we have seen significant achievements in capturing economic fugitives and confiscating their ill-gotten funds in the past five years,” said Cai Wei, deputy director of the International Cooperation Bureau, which is responsible to the National Supervisory Commission.

“We have cut off the suspects’ escape routes and given them little room to move outside China, and have also effectively changed their ideas about fleeing overseas, laying a solid foundation for achieving an overwhelming victory in the fight against corruption,” he said.

More than five years ago, a number of corrupt officials and directors of State-owned companies took advantage of judicial differences and the lack of bilateral extradition treaties to escape to popular Western destinations, including the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to avoid punishment.

They sent millions of yuan in illicit assets to their accounts overseas through money laundering. To date, more than 900 corrupt officials are still at large abroad, especially in Western countries.

In 2014, China set up an office to coordinate anti-corruption efforts to help bolster the hunt for economic fugitives and return their ill-gotten funds.

“Wherever the suspects may flee, we will capture and bring them to justice,” President Xi Jinping said in October 2017 during the 19th Communist Party of China National Congress.

In April 2015, the office saw Interpol red notices issued for 100 of the country’s top corruption suspects. To date, 59 of them have returned from more than 17 countries and regions, including the latest, Liu Baofeng, former director of a local branch of Huatai Securities in Shenzhen, Guangdong province.

In late June, Liu, 53, who is accused of corruption and embezzling public funds for stock trading, returned home to plead guilty after spending 18 years on the run in Canada. He has yet to be sentenced.

“I have shown remorse for my crimes, and realized that foreign countries are not safe havens,” he said.

Song Wei, head of the Anti-corruption Research Center at the University of Science and Technology Beijing, said, “The fruitful results in seizing fugitives show fully that we have improved the ability to capture suspects and secured the system to prevent others fleeing overseas.”

Zhuang Deshui, an anti-corruption professor at Peking University, said that recently the number of officials suspected of corruption fleeing overseas is much lower than those who have returned from abroad, mainly because “an effective mechanism has been established to timely monitor the Party and government officials and prevent them escaping abroad”.

He said anti-graft officers should enhance political and legal education for public officials and guide them to abide by the laws.

Moreover, Zhuang said advanced methods, including big data analysis and updated information technology, will be used to tighten management and supervision of Party members to avoid them fleeing overseas.

Enhanced efforts

To help strengthen the hunt for fugitives, in March last year, the National Supervisory Commission and commissions at all levels were established nationwide to enhance efforts to combat fugitives and return their ill-gotten assets.

Jiang Laiyong, a senior researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the new commissions have integrated supervisory, anti-corruption, and bribery and corruption-prevention functions throughout various departments, and optimized resources for fighting graft.

“The new supervisory system has extended inspection from Party members to all public officials, leaving no loopholes in the supervision of power, and no dead ends in fighting corruption,” he said.

According to the National Supervisory Commission, after the commissions at all levels were set up, the number of people under their supervision rose sharply.

Huang Feng, law professor at Beijing Normal University, said, “Under the new commissions, there is wider supervision of people. Supervisors also have a more challenging task in seizing fugitives and returning their dirty money.”

Xu Yi, an official with the Shenzhen City Commission of Supervision in Guangdong, said it has tightened oversight of public officials’ passports and is using facial recognition technology to investigate those who use their ID cards to apply for duplicate passports with different public security departments.

Last year, the commission discovered more than 300 duplicate ID cards and passports, he said.

Supervisors in Shenzhen have also worked closely with the anti-money laundering department at the People’s Bank of China in the city to monitor any suspicious flow of funds being sent to officials’ accounts overseas and to promptly share intelligence, while tightening border controls, he said.

Guo Yong, director of the Center for Anti-Corruption and Governance at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said fighting corruption is a global issue, and only if all countries approach it correctly and realize the great harm that graft causes will it be possible to combat it.

Cai, from the International Cooperation Bureau, said China will deepen pragmatic judicial cooperation with other countries under the newly passed International Criminal Justice Assistance Law to extradite, repatriate and persuade more fugitives to face trial.

Last year, China extradited 12 economic fugitives from six countries, including South Korea, Bulgaria, Spain and Portugal, to face justice.

In addition, judicial officers signed extradition treaties with five countries, four judicial assistance agreements and four financial intelligence exchange agreements.

According to the commission, anti-graft officers will strengthen intelligence-sharing and cooperation on joint investigations with “relevant countries” on some major and individual cases.

zhangyan1@chinadaily.com.cn


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