Police in Shanghai have arrested three men who were setting up an illegal bank and who had already attracted a deposit of 125,000 yuan (about HK$117,037) from a local company.
The Legal Daily reported the leader of the trio was a man named Liu Jiaren, 65, who used the alias Liu Bang. He had served 17 years in prison in two terms for robbery and fraud.
In 1996, he started planning the 'China International Bank' - making a State Council (cabinet) chop and used it to fake documents giving him permission to set up the bank. He recruited several associates and persuaded some financial institutions to give him funds to get started.
The police got their first tip-off in the case on April 28 when someone told them that Liu had approached him with a document showing that he had US$5 million on deposit at Citibank and that he had used this to obtain a deposit of 125,000 yuan from a Shanghai company. The Citibank document turned out to be fake.
Police tracked Liu down to the hotel room he used as his office and found there a large number of documents he was preparing to use to launch the bank.
All of them were fakes.
The newspaper also reported the sentence handed down by a court in Shaoxing, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, to a senior official of a local financial institution who bribed many of the leaders of Ningbo city and lost thousands of yuan on the gambling tables of Macau.
