China anti-graft body vows crackdown on finance sector corruption

CHINA’S top graft-busting body on Thursday (Feb 23) vowed to “resolutely” crack down on corruption in the financial sector, days after a well-known Chinese dealmaker became the latest business executive to go missing without explanation.

In a strongly worded commentary on its website, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) vowed to “seriously punish ... corrupt elements” in “resource-rich, capital-intensive areas” including finance, state-owned enterprises and grain purchasing entities.

“We must resolutely investigate and deal with corruption where political and economic issues are intertwined, resolutely prevent leading cadres from becoming spokesmen and agents for interest groups and powerful groups, and resolutely prevent political-business collusion,” it said.

The wording suggests that President Xi Jinping’s signature anti-corruption campaign is increasingly turning towards the corporate sector.

CCDI corruption probes in recent years felled government and Communist Party officials, including in the police and the judiciary.

The abrupt disappearance last week of Bao Fan, founder of investment bank China Renaissance, sent chills through the business sector and was the latest in a series of cases of high-profile Chinese executives to suddenly vanish from public view.

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The CCDI, which roots out and punishes corruption within the 97 million-member ruling Communist Party, is extremely powerful and operates above state oversight. Fighting corruption to advance the party’s “self-revolution” has been a signature tool of Xi’s rule since he became China’s supreme leader in 2012.

Xi’s corruption fight has proven popular among a public that had grown fed up with widespread graft, and has also helped him consolidate power by replacing rivals with his own loyalists, analysts have said.

Thursday’s statement comes more than a year after the CCDI launched a high-profile investigation of the state banking and insurance regulator in October 2021, as part of a broader campaign to weed out corrupt Communist Party officials in the financial sector. REUTERS