(Beijing Comprehensive News) After fleeing to the United States for 17 years, Xu Chaofan, the main criminal in the biggest bank corruption case since the founding of the Communist Party of China and the former president of the Kaiping branch of the Bank of China in Guangdong Province, was forcibly repatriated yesterday.
According to the official website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Anti-Corruption Working Group of the China-U.S. Law Enforcement Cooperation Joint Liaison Group previously identified the Xu Chaofan case as a key case of fugitives and stolen goods between the two countries. Under the strong pressure and policies of Sino-US law enforcement cooperation, Xu Chaofan finally accepted the repatriation arrangement.
According to the official website, the successful repatriation of Xu Chaofan is an important achievement of Sino-US anti-corruption law enforcement cooperation.Transformed into a concrete manifestation of governance effectiveness.
This case is also China's first successful case in which a fugitive from an important duty-related crime was forcibly repatriated in a developed country after being prosecuted in a different place and serving his sentence in a different place.
So far, Chinese case-handling units and the Bank of China have recovered more than 2 billion yuan (S$481 million) of stolen money from Xu Chaofan from domestic and foreign sources.
At the beginning of October 2001, when the Bank of China implemented online monitoring of computers across the country for the first time, it discovered a gap of more than US$480 million (S$660 million) in the bank's funds. The location of the incident was locked in Kaiping City, Jiangmen City, Guangdong Province.On October 12, the bank discovered that the whereabouts of Xu Chaofan, Yu Zhendong, and Xu Guojun, the three successive presidents of the Kaiping branch, were missing, and immediately reported the case to the relevant departments.After investigation, the three were suspected of colluding with corruption and misappropriating funds from the Bank of China, and fled to the United States via Hong Kong and Canada. The three were arrested in the United States.
Yu Zhendong was tried in the United States in 2004. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the crime of obtaining a visa by fraudulent means. He was then voluntarily deported to China.In 2009, Xu Chaofan and Xu Guojun were sentenced to 25 and 22 years in prison in the United States respectively.
Prior to this, Xu Chaofan's wife Kuang Wanfang was forcibly repatriated by the United States in 2015.Among the fugitives in this major financial theft case that once shocked China, Xu Guojun is the only one who has not yet been brought to justice.
