A secret Beijing apartment full of cash
Photo credit: The China Project illustration by Derek Zheng
The former chairman of a scandal-plagued Chinese bank has confessed to hiding millions of yuan in bribes in a Beijing apartment in what Bloomberg calledย โone of Chinaโs biggest financial corruption cases.โ
Taking bribes, corruption, and bigamyย were the chargesย against Lร i Xiวomรญn ่ตๅฐๆฐ, former head of China Huarong Asset Management Company. (Chinese officials up on corruption charges are also often disciplined for bigamy or other crimes of a sexual nature.) Huarong is state-controlled, but also listedย on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Last week, Lai confessedย in a state TV documentaryย (in Chinese) that he preferred his bribes as cash payments. He said he would fill up his car trunk with cash, and then stash it at a secret, unoccupied apartment. Anti-corruption investigators found more than 200 million yuan ($29 million) in cash.
Chinaโs highest-denomination bank notes are 100 yuan, so Lai would have had at least 2 million pieces of paper money, which would make a block of about 2.4 cubic meters in volume, according to this Chinese-language calculation. ย
