http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2006/01/image_of_internet_police_jingjing_and_chacha_online_hon.php
Jinging and Chacha are Chinese Internet cops. These fetching
Sino-anime cartoons were recently placed on servers in Shenzhen
so as to establish an atmosphere of deterrence among Chinese
websurfers tempted to get up to mischief on the global Internet.
These two digitized chip-surfing cream-puffs may have a job of work on their hands – not with China's online dissidents, but with its globally-minded bankers. It would seem that about 4,000 Chinese bankers have filled their pockets with fifty billion dollars of embezzled Chinese money and absconded overseas. Who wants to bet they booked those trips by Internet?
http://admin.corisweb.org/index.php?fuseaction=news.view&id=121572&src=dcn
†
China
Global hunt highlights scale of graft in China
International Herald Tribune, 19 June 2006
BEIJING: They may have been small- time bankers from a provincial Chinese city, but they traveled like high rollers.
On Oct. 2, 2001, three junior Bank of China managers from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong boarded a private jet in Vancouver for a flight to Las Vegas. One of the bankers, Xu Chaofan, was in a generous mood. He tipped the flight operator more than $1,200, according to evidence that Bank of China later presented in a Hong Kong court. The bank testified that Xu then lost $2,368,400 on the tables at the Caesar's Palace and Paris casinos.
For a man on a modest salary, this should have been a heavy financial blow. At the time, Xu and his colleagues, Yu Zhendong and Xu Guojun, were earning about $925 a month.
However, court records in Hong Kong and the United States suggest that this was but a minor setback for the three bankers. They are accused of conspiring to embezzle at least $485 million from Bank of China's branch at Kaiping, a small city in the booming Pearl River Delta, before fleeing overseas. Yu has been convicted in the United States and repatriated to China, where he is serving a 12-year prison sentence.
The sheer scale of the Kaiping scandal highlights China's challenge in cleaning up a banking system riddled with corruption and mismanagement.
"The internal controls in China's banking system are really, really poor," said Liao Ran, the program coordinator for South Asia and greater China at Transparency International, an independent anti-corruption organization based in Berlin. "Kaiping is not the only case. There have been many others."
Corruption scandals have rocked state-owned banks, including Bank of China, in recent years, with dozens of officials jailed or dismissed as a result.
For the banks, the stakes are high. Failure to stamp out corruption could leave them vulnerable to competition from well-run foreign banks gearing up to enter the Chinese market. Under the terms of China's entry into the World Trade Organization, foreign banks will be allowed to operate freely in China as of the end of this year. If losses from corruption continue to erode profit and damage public confidence in domestic banks, China's army of thrifty savers could be tempted to switch their business to the newcomers. (((An alternate scenario: China's "army of thrifty savers' *prefers* a corrupt banking system so that they too might win the lottery and zoom offshore to Vegas.)))
"Corporate governance issues are one of the biggest challenges the Chinese face," said Charlene Chu, a banking analyst for the financial ratings agency Fitch Ratings who is based in Beijing. "Banks have recognized that getting control over the branches is really the key." (((Alternate scenario: A fish rots from the head down, and since the Communist Party has no visible means of legitimacy, everybody might as well be on the take. Except for Jingjing and Chacha, who would never take bribes from rich bankers with Party political connections.)))
Apart from the size of the theft, the Kaiping case stands out from many other graft investigations in China because the authorities have had to take legal action offshore, mainly in Hong Kong and the United States, as they scrambled to recover the stolen funds.
China has also needed the cooperation of law enforcement agencies in Hong Kong, Canada and the United States to track down the fugitives from what has been described as the country's biggest bank theft since the Communists came to power in 1949.
This has opened a rare window on official corruption at a time when most graft investigations remain confidential until suspects are detained or a court verdict issued. Even then, usually only limited information is made public.
"I think domestically, these things have been kept fairly quiet," said Li Hui, head of China research for the Hong Kong-based brokerage firm CLSA Asia- Pacific Markets. "There is always an information gap in China." (((Mostly because Jingjing and Chacha are there to make real sure nobody fills it.)))
The international pursuit of the Kaiping managers has also drawn fresh attention to an exodus from China of corrupt government officials and their families. As many as 4,000 officials have pocketed more than $50 billion and fled the country in recent years, according to reports in the official media. (((And that's the OFFICIAL media report.)))
(...)
For Yu, freedom was short-lived. He was arrested in Los Angeles 14 months after leaving China. In April 2004 he pleaded guilty to racketeering charges arising from the Kaiping theft and was sentenced in the U.S. District Court in Las Vegas to 12 years in prison.
As part of a plea agreement, Yu, 43, was returned to face the courts in his homeland on the condition that he would not be sentenced to a term longer than 12 years, tortured or executed. (((Oh come on, in today's world, what's a little torture and execution of global outlaws?)))
((( What the USA needs is to take a leaf out of Jingjing's notebook. The USA should design a couple of little male and female NSA Echelon cartoon cops to sit right on top of AT&T's switching stations. Maybe one for the secret police on the American voice traffic, and one for the secret police in the American banking sector.)))
