China has been shaken by a series of large-scale bank robberies in recent years, but they are not the Bonnie-and-Clyde type.
These are inside jobs: Top executives, branch managers, loan officers and thousands of everyday employees have been running off with billions in customers' money.
Consider what has happened in just the first two months of this year. First, a branch manager at the Bank of China disappeared with more than US$100 million in cash. A few weeks later, dozens of employees of another commercial bank were arrested for conspiring to steal nearly US$1 billion in funds. And then midlevel officials of the China Construction Bank apparently fled the country with about US$8 million in cash.
There is no word yet on whether any of the money has been recovered. But the chain of events underlines an ugly byproduct of China's aggressive embrace of a get-rich-quick form of capitalism: a long-running wave of corporate and government corruption scandals.
The financial scandal watch gained new prominence last week with news reports that Zhang Enzhao (
The bank later issued a statement saying he resigned for "personal reasons."
The scandals are by no means limited to banks. Since the early 1990s, China's modern robber barons have focused on all manner of state-run companies. Brokerage houses, government-controlled asset management firms and dozens of state-owned companies have been looted of billions, according to government investigators.
The official media are filled with accounts of executives and public employees accused of embezzling money and sometimes gambling away those funds at border casinos.
With China awash in speculative money intended to fuel its economic boom, many corporate executives have turned greedy, and even low-level employees are engaging in conflict-ridden, self-dealing transactions and learning how to funnel millions of dollars into offshore accounts.
"Corruption is pervasive in China," said Larry Lang, a professor of finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "A lot of state-owned companies have been simply stripped clean."
Few experts say that the scandals will slow China's roaring economic growth anytime soon. But economists and government officials worry that the glaring examples of fraud, bribery and embezzlement could seriously hinder the development of the nation's banking and financial systems, which desperately need to be modernized for China to become a full-fledged economic superpower.
In the last four years, at least 25 government officials have been sentenced to death for accepting bribes and kickbacks. Hundreds more are serving lengthy prison terms.
But every month, the number of fraud cases seems to mushroom. On March 9, the government announced that 58,000 people had been punished for misappropriating money or making unauthorized loans at just two of the big four state-owned banks. In 2003 alone, officials said that nearly US$8 billion was pilfered from government-owned enterprises.
In many ways, the corruption scandals offer a telling glimpse into the darker side of China's remarkable ascent. Though the economy is soaring and foreign investment continues to flood into the coastal provinces, China's finances in different ways are in a mess.
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