A Chinese court has sentenced a former official at the Agricultural Bank of China to death for accepting bribes and embezzling funds worth 15 million yuan ($1.86 million), state media said on Wednesday.
Wen Mengjie, who used to work in the bank's technology department in Beijing, used the money to buy houses, the official China Daily said. Wen, who was arrested last year, said the bribes were commissions paid during the purchase of automatic teller machines and that he would appeal against the ruling, the report said.
Chinese banks uncovered 613 criminal cases involving their funds in the first nine months of 2005, about 40 percent more than a year earlier, the bank regulator said last month, underscoring a tough battle to rein in financial risk.
Authorities had handled 894 criminal cases among banking institutions during the January-September period, resulting in the punishment of 892 officials, the China Banking Regulatory Commission said.
The government has in recent months stepped up a crackdown on crimes at major state banks, smaller commercial banks and rural credit co-operatives by improving internal audits. Government efforts to reform China's creaking banking sector, buckling under mountains of bad loans, have been tarnished by a strain of scandals that have underscored poor corporate governance and weak internal controls within state lenders.
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