China’s ex-Interpol president Meng Hongwei jailed for 13½ years for corruption

The former head of the international policing agency Interpol was sentenced to 13½ years in jail for corruption by a Chinese court on Tuesday, state media reported.

In a trial at Tianjin No 1 Intermediate People’s Court, Meng Hongwei, the first person from China to become president of Interpol, was also fined 2 million yuan (about US$290,000), state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Meng, 66, said he would not appeal, the report said. It said that between 2005 and 2017 Meng had used privileges in his positions as vice-minister of public security and chief of China’s maritime police to receive bribes totalling 14.46 million yuan (US$2.1 million).

“The court rules that Meng Hongwei has committed bribe-taking offences and should be punished by law,” read the verdict, published online by the Supreme Court of China on Tuesday.

“The court has made the judgment after taking into consideration that Meng Hongwei has proactively turned in most information about the charges that the authorities were not able to obtain, and that he has admitted to the charges and that some of the bribes could not be retrieved.”

Meng’s case has been one of the most high-profile of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s corruption crackdown. He was the serving president of Interpol when he was reported missing in France in October 2018 by his wife, Grace Meng, who had lost contact with Meng as he travelled to China from their home in Lyon, where Interpol is based.

Interpol said days later that Meng had quit as its president with immediate effect. Later that month, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Chinese Communist Party’s anticorruption watchdog, confirmed that Meng had been detained and placed under investigation.

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In Meng’s previous court appearance, when his trial began last June, he admitted using his past positions to help companies and people make illegal gains.

Grace Meng later launched a lawsuit against Interpol at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, for failing to protect his family and for what she described as the agency’s complicity in “the internationally wrongful acts of its member country, China”. She alleged that the global policing body had tried to gag her.

An Interpol spokesman said that her allegations were “baseless” and that the agency denied being complicit in or having “any involvement with China’s actions against” her husband.

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Meng Hongwei took over the top job at Interpol in November 2016, with his appointment being hailed by state media as evidence of the international community’s “full recognition” of China’s law enforcement capacity and status as a country based on the rule of law.

Less than a year later, he hosted Interpol’s general assembly in Beijing, at which Xi pledged to increase China’s support for the agency and help raise its profile.

Before that, Meng, a Peking University law graduate, had been among the most powerful police officers in China.

He was appointed a vice-minister of public security in 2004, and head of the Chinese branch of Interpol in the same year.

He took charge of a number of sensitive portfolios, including the country’s counterterrorism division following violence in Xinjiang, in China’s far west, in 2011.

After his detention, Meng was last March expelled from the Communist Party and stripped of all his positions for “serious violations of law and discipline”. Chinese prosecutors announced in April that he had been formally arrested on suspicion of taking bribes.