China: Former head of banking giant Everbright arrested for corruption amid financial sector purge
In China, the former head of the Everbright banking group has been arrested "in recent days", the Chinese authorities said on Monday (January 15th). Suspected of accepting bribes and embezzling public funds, Tang Shuangning is now part of a long line of financial sector figures caught in the net of Chinese President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign.
Tang Shuangning, pictured here when he was still vice chairman of China's Banking Regulatory Commission, at a conference in Beijing on Nov. 23, 2006. © Goh Chai Hin / AFP
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With our correspondent in Beijing, Stéphane Lagarde
The watchword in China seems to be "watch the bosses fall", or rather the retired ex-bosses, in the case of Tang Shuangning: at 69 years old, he was forced to surrender his Chinese Communist Party card earlier this month. Everyone understood that it smelled scorched for the former head of the Chinese banking group Everbright, a Chinese state-owned financial heavyweight that, in 2022, employed more than 47,000 people.
Calligrapher Skills
The former chairman of Everbrigth's board of directors between 2007 and 2017 was once praised by state media for his calligraphy skills. But Mr. Tang is now accused of "indulging in a life of pleasure and comfort" and "abandoning his responsibilities," which allegedly prevented the company from preventing financial risks. He also allegedly used public funds to travel, smuggled unauthorized books into China and took bribes.
This new arrest, ordered "in recent days" by the Supreme People's Procuratorate, follows a massacre in high finance circles. Last month, Sun Guofeng, former head of the central bank's monetary policy department, was sentenced to 16 years and six months in prison for bribery and leaking state secrets.
In October, Liu Lange, the former president of the Bank of China, was arrested on charges of bribery and illegal lending. In the same month, Tang's successor at Everbright, Li Xiaopeng, was also arrested for the same reasons.
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