China has executed a former senior banker who was found guilty of taking more than 1.1 billion yuan (US$155 million) in bribes.
Bai Tianhui, the former general manager of the asset management firm China Huarong International Holdings, was executed on Tuesday after the Supreme People’s Court approved the sentence, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
The state-owned offshore unit Bai ran was taken over by Citic Group and renamed China Citic Financial Asset Management in January last year.
I’m not a proponent of the death penalty, but I do see how financial crimes like bribery and fraud go unpunished or with very light prison sentences in the US while petty crimes like owning marijuana can get you huge sentences and I think it really says a lot about the system you live in.
Crimes that impact no one or almost no one gets huge sentences to punish the poor or to look “tough on crime”, while people like Donald Trump will openly take bribes and perform quid-pro-quo and suffer no consequences.
