Communist Party anti-graft watchdog to set sights on state-owned firms

Communist Party graft-busters will turn up the heat on big state-owned enterprises this year, making them a major target of the country's massive anti-corruption campaign.

"[We] will inspect all major state-owned firms that are directly under the management of the central government this year," the party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said yesterday in a statement at the end of a three-day full meeting in the capital.

The party has used the inspection process as an "incisive sword", or advance force, in its ongoing anti-corruption campaign. As part of the push, the commission ordered three rounds of inspections covering more than 40 "regions and entities" last year, double the number carried out in 2013.

The state assets regulator also has its own inspection system to monitor the 113 state firms under its management. It identified 325 "problematic cases" and passed on information on 88 potential graft cases to the commission in 2014.

By the end of last year, the commission had inspected all provinces, the semi-military Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, as well as 19 ministries and state-owned enterprises.

In November last year, it embarked on a round of more "targeted and focused" probes, most of which were into state firms, including Sinopec and China Southern Airlines. The investigations were seen then as a sign that graft-busters had their sights on corrupt SOE executives.

At this week's gathering, President Xi Jinping called for tighter oversight of state-owned companies, with monitoring to be ramped up on four fronts: regulatory and inspection systems, party loyalty, supervision of executives, and audits of the firms.