Couple jailed for cheating bank out of 420m yuan
The Zhongshan intermediate court yesterday sentenced a couple to life and 14 years imprisonment respectively for embezzling 420 million yuan from a Bank of China branch office in the city between October 1993 and May 1995 to settle their gambling debts.
About 310 million yuan had yet to be recovered, Xinhua reported last night. Chen Manxiong and his wife Chen Qiuyuan , both former managers of a government-owned enterprise in Zhongshan, were the latest of a series of verdicts on corrupt officials handed down by mainland court this week.
Chen Manxiong was given life imprisonment.
The pair had fled the country and were arrested in late 2000 in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. They were extradited to the mainland in December 2002.
On Tuesday, Xue Changchun , former general manager of a state-owned poverty-relief company in Guangzhou, was sentenced to death for misappropriating and embezzling 14 million yuan of public money. Losses incurred by the Guangdong Poverty-relief Economic Development Company totalled 7.5 million yuan.
As the end of the year draws near, courts are speeding up trial of graft cases.
Xinhuanet reported yesterday that the Supreme People's Procuratorate said that Chinese procuratorates would exert special efforts to look into graft cases in key construction projects, duty crimes in financial and land trading fields, and corruption in restructuring or bankruptcy of state firms.
