A former employee of BNP Paribas allegedly bribed a mainland official to gain an underwriting contract for the country's first euro-denominated foreign bonds, according to a mainland media report.
Min Liu, as then head of the French bank's fixed income unit in China, purportedly gave US$128,000 to Xu Fangming, then financial director of the Ministry of Finance, to gain the bank a slot as one of three sponsors of the ministry's Euro550 million (HK$5.78 billion) five-year bond in 2001, according to the weekly magazine Caijing.
The report, citing a court document, said Ms Liu, a French national, asked Xu 'not to oppose the BNP bid'. The information was provided as part of a case against Xu, who was arrested in 2005 for bribery and was sentenced to 13 years in prison last year.
Xu, who was in charge of the bond sale, was accused of taking the money from Ms Liu between 1999 and 2001, the Caijing report said. Neither Ms Liu nor BNP Paribas faced any charges, the report said.
According to a BNP Paribas report last year, a person whose name was written in English as 'Ming Liu' - pronounced differently from the Chinese characters for Min Liu - was the head of the bank's fixed income unit in China.
A person reached on the telephone number given in the bank report said Ming Liu left the firm 'a long time ago', but she declined to clarify whether Ming Liu and Min Liu were one and the same person.
The Caijing report quoted BNP Paribas spokeswoman Christine Chan as saying: 'Liu is not working with the bank.'