Posted on 06/28/2009 1:03:27 AM PDT by bruinbirdman
Beijing's efforts to crack down on gambling by Communist Party and government officials with public funds seem to have made little headway. While longer jail terms and the risk of losing their jobs fail to deter officials from gambling, visa restrictions to Macau - the most popular gambling destinations for Chinese officials - has only driven officials to online casinos. As a result, online gambling inside China increasingly flourishes and the sums involved are become increasingly staggering.
Police in Central China's Hubei province recently found that government officials and heads of state-owned companies were among the tens of thousands of people gambling on sports and horse races, as well as lotteries like the Mark Six in six online casinos. The casinos have managed to accrue more than 50 billion yuan (US$7 billion) since the illegal operations began in 2004.
The offenders include the head of a state-owned enterprise who gambled away more than 100 million yuan of company money in total, breaking the record set by Li Weimin, the mayor of a small city in Guangdong who lost more than 90 million yuan in Macau casinos between 1998 and 2004.
The news triggered public outrage. Critics asked how such a huge amount of money of a state firm could so easily be "stolen" by its executive without being caught by the state-asset watchdog overseeing the operations of state-owned enterprises. Had police not investigated the casinos, the gambling executive might never have been caught.
Police did not say how many more government officials and managers had taken part in online gambling or how much money they gambled, but the cases - said to be the biggest online gambling case ever uncovered in China in terms of the amount of money and number of participants - shows that Beijing's battle against gambling
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
Our government officials gamble with public funds too.
But we call it ‘legislation’.
As long as China embraces communism in government, it never will be able to purge this kind of corruption. That is going to put a serious damper on its ambitions, no ifs ands or buts.
So true.
Or cutesie pie names like Porkulus.
Tragedy of the commons.
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