China catches 150 corruption suspects overseas since start of the year
Eight of the fugitives had been on the run for more than 10 years, according to a public security ministry official
PUBLISHED : Friday, 15 May, 2015, 10:39am
UPDATED : Friday, 15 May, 2015, 4:03pm
Reuters and Keira Lu Huang
Fraud suspect Li Huabo, centre, is led away by police at Beijing airport earlier this month. He was caught in Singapore. Photo: Xinhua
China has repatriated 150 corruption suspects from 32 countries this year as the government’s crackdown on economic crimes intensifies.
Eight of the suspects had been on the run for more than 10 years and 44 were involved in cases relating to tens of millions of yuan, mainland media cited Gao Feng, the political commissar of the Public Security Ministry’s economic crimes bureau, as saying.
Operation Fox Hunt was launched by the government last year to trace suspects who had fled abroad, often taking large sums of money with them.
It forms part of a campaign led by President Xi Jinping to try to stamp out corruption.
However, one of the most notorious suspects, Dai Xuemin, was caught when he tried to sneak back into the country.
Dai, a former chief of securities sales at a state-owned trust company that was closed by the People’s Bank of China in 2002, was the first of the 150 suspects to be caught. He fled overseas in 2001.
He was caught in China on April 25 after police were tipped off that he had returned to country with a foreign passport, Xinhua reported.
State media also reported earlier this month that police had caught the second suspect on their list of their most wanted fugitives.
Li Huabo, a former finance official in eastern Jiangxi province, was caught in Singapore.
He is accused of fraud involving 94 million yuan (HK$119 million).
Gao said a total of 100,000 economic crime cases involving nearly 192 billion yuan had been solved. Most case involved illegal fundraising from the public, credit card fraud and currency counterfeiting.
Following Beijing’s call, provincial police have also geared up to hunt down fugitives overseas. According to Xinhua, Guangdong police seized 25 fugitives overseas while Jiangsu police returned 20 suspects from abroad.
The Ministry of Public Security said in January that it had captured 680 fugitives between July and December last year, a number it described as unprecedented.
Recently, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the nation’s top prosecutors, extended the project to seize fugitives and their illicit gains overseas until the end of the year, said Xinhua.
The prosecutors planned to start with the most popular destinations among high-ranking fugitives, according to the directives.
