Free Republic

Lai Xiaomin, former chairman of China Huarong Asset Management Co., the country’s largest such firm, was executed by a court in Tianjin city on Jan. 29. The firm was founded in Beijing on Nov. 8, 1999. Since September 2012, Lai also served as the company’s Chinese Communist Party chief. Lai was first placed under investigation by China’s anti-corruption watchdog in April 2018. On Jan. 5, 2021, he was sentenced to death without reprieve by the Tianjin intermediate court, on charges of bribery, embezzlement, and bigamy. The court noted that most of the activity in question took place after the 18th...

A former chief of a big Chinese state lender was sentenced to death on Tuesday for bribery, corruption and bigamy, in a rare and dramatic example of Beijing’s use of capital punishment for economic crimes. Lai Xiaomin, the former chairman of Huarong Asset Management, was found guilty by a court in the coastal city of Tianjin of receiving some $277 million in bribes between 2008 and 2018. The government will confiscate his personal assets, it said. Mr. Lai was “lawless and extremely greedy,” the Secondary Intermediate People’s Court of Tianjin said Tuesday in a statement, which added that his actions...