Former chairman of Hengfeng Bank imprisoned for siphoning off millions through corruption and embezzlement

A court in eastern China has handed down a suspended death sentence to a corrupt former chairman of a troubled regional lender, indicating Beijing’s determination to clamp down on banking risks.
The Yantai Intermediate People’s Court in Shandong province handed down a death sentence with a two-year reprieve to Jiang Xiyun, chairman of Hengfeng Bank from 2008 to 2013, for embezzling 754 million yuan (US$107 million) in the bank’s shares, taking 60 million yuan in bribes, illegally guaranteeing 3.7 billion yuan in credit, and destroying accounts and records related to 660 million yuan, according to a court ruling published on Thursday.
Suspended death sentences are usually commuted to life in prison in return for good behaviour during the reprieve period. However Jiang, 70, is unlikely to leave prison, with the court saying he would not be granted any further reduction in jail term or parole if the sentence was commuted.
The ruling shed fresh light on lender’s operations under Jiang and his successor Cai Guohua, which ended this year with one of the most spectacular bank failures in China.
The bank has not published financial statements since 2016 and last week received a state-led bailout of US$14 billion.
Cai has been the subject of a disciplinary investigation since late 2017 and is facing charges of taking bribes and misusing funds. According to financial magazine Caixin, Cai allegedly attempted to misuse billions of the bank’s funds and financed his lavish personal lifestyle with bank money, spending roughly 400,000 yuan per day.
The sentence imposed on Jiang is unusually harsh but not without precedent.
In December last year, Yang Chenglin, former chairman of Bank of Inner Mongolia, was given the same sentence for taking over 300 million yuan in bribes. And suspended death sentences were handed to both Liu Jinbao, the former chief executive of Bank of China Hong Kong, in 2005 for embezzlement, and Wang Yi, the former deputy governor of China Development Bank, in 2010, also for embezzlement.
Hengfeng Bank was founded in 1987 as a pioneering home savings bank. It became a joint-stock bank with a business licence to operate nationwide in 2003. Singaporean lender United Overseas Bank bought 15 per cent of the lender for US$115 million in 2008, and its stake is expected to be diluted to about 3 per cent after the bailout this week.
The bank now has 306 sub-branches across the country and it is the third lender to be bailed out by the state since May.
In May, serious credit risks forced the central government to take over Baoshang Bank in Inner Mongolia, the country’s first bank failure in more than 20 years. A few weeks later, Bank of Jinzhou, based in China’s rust-belt province of Liaoning, was bailed out by China’s biggest lender, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and China’s top state-owned asset management firms.
The former chairman of Jinzhou Bank, Zhang Wei, died of cancer earlier this month. Caixin reported that Zhang tried to flee China for the United States in July 2019 but he was stopped by the police.
Many banking institutions are struggling to repay debts and facing great pressure to attract new deposits amid the slowest economic growth in nearly three decades, raising concerns about the weak links in China’s banking system, particularly city commercial and rural banks.