The former chairman of one of China's biggest banks pleaded guilty to charges that he took bribes to arrange loans, a news report said yesterday, adding to a string of high-level graft cases at Chinese banks.
Zhang Enzhao (
Zhang pleaded guilty Thursday in the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate Court to taking bribes but said the amount was lower than the 4.15 million yuan (US$520,000) cited by prosecutors, the Beijing News reported.
It was the most detailed account yet of the charges against the 60-year-old Zhang.
The report didn't say when Zhang might be sentenced or what penalty he might face. A court employee who would give only his surname, Liu, confirmed that Zhang stood trial on Thursday but said he didn't know how he pleaded or other details.
China's banking industry has been battered by an embarrassing parade of dozens of such cases, usually against managers accused of embezzlement or arranging fraudulent loans.
The scandals come at a time when Chinese banks are trying to raise money from foreign investors to modernize operations, as Beijing prepares to fully open their market to foreign rivals. Much of the wrongdoing has been uncovered as banks undergo audits in preparation for selling shares on Chinese and foreign stock markets.
But the revelations haven't shaken investor enthusiasm for Chinese banks. Construction Bank, the first of the "big four" banks to hold an initial public offering abroad, raised US$9.2 billion last October in Hong Kong in the world's biggest IPO of this year.
A former Construction Bank president, Wang Xuebing (王雪冰), was sentenced in 2003 to 12 years in prison on charges of taking bribes while in a former post as New York City branch manager of another major Chinese bank. That bank, Bank of China Ltd (中國銀行), agreed to pay a US$20 million fine to US and Chinese regulators.
In the biggest reported case to date, a former Bank of China employee was sentenced in April to 12 years in prison for help to embezzle US$485 million from the bank. The employee was extradited from the US in 2004 after Chinese authorities promised he wouldn't face a possible death penalty.
Zhang, the former Construction Bank chairman, faced 19 counts of taking cash and property in exchange for helping people obtain loans from his bank, according to the Beijing News.
Zhang also is accused in a separate case in California of taking a US$1 million bribe in exchange for arranging for a US-based company to obtain contracts.
According to Zhang's lawyer, Gao Zicheng, the real amount of the bribe was 1.5 million yuan, and the rest was a gift from an old friend.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day