Skip to main content

China | Ex-chairman of China’s Huarong Asset Management sentenced to death

Lai Xiaomin found guilty of taking bribes totalling $279m, other acts of corruption and bigamy

The former head of one of China’s biggest asset management companies has been sentenced to death for corruption, in a relatively rare instance of the country meting out the death penalty for financial crimes.

Lai Xiaomin was chairman of Huarong Asset Management at the time of his arrest in 2018. He was found guilty of taking bribes totalling Rmb1.8bn ($279m) over a 10-year period, other acts of corruption and bigamy.

The court in the northern city of Tianjin, where Lai was sentenced on Tuesday, said his crimes “caused serious losses to the interests of the country”.

According to state media accounts, Lai deposited Rmb300m in a bank account nominally belonging to his mother and stashed tonnes of cash at his home in Beijing.

Chen Long at Plenum, a Beijing-based consultancy, said death sentences for corruption without a reprieve, after which they are usually commuted to life sentences. were now “extremely rare”. “The corruption amount was probably a record and Huarong’s losses possibly larger,” Mr Chen said.

In 2018 the deputy mayor of a city in northern Shanxi province was sentenced to death for taking bribes exceeding Rmb1bn.

Huarong was one of four asset management companies originally established in 1999 to take bad debts off China’s largest state-owned banks, in order to help them lower their non-performing loan ratios and prepare for stock market listings. The four AMCs absorbed bad loans with a total face value of $800bn, although their market value was a fraction of that amount.

Huarong was paired with Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the country’s largest lender, and absorbed bad loans valued at Rmb408bn.

But instead of winding down after selling off the bad loans, the AMCs evolved into giant financial conglomerates in their own right.

Under Lai’s leadership, Huarong raised vast amounts of capital and expanded aggressively into investment banking services. In the five years through 2018, China’s four largest AMCs raised more than $100bn from debt markets, with Huarong accounting for about half of their total issuance.

Huarong, which listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange five years ago, also developed its own brokerage, insurance and leasing arms, as well as non-financial businesses including property development. Caixin, a leading finance magazine, reported that 100 properties developed by a Huarong subsidiary in south China were distributed to Lai’s ex-wife and mistresses.

Huarong’s rapid expansion, as well as the high-yield loans its investment bank clients sometimes struggled to repay, eventually attracted scrutiny from regulators as President Xi Jinping’s top economic adviser, vice- premier Liu He, ramped up a series of campaigns against risky financial practices.

Following Lai’s arrest, Huarong made an unprecedented offer to swap share certificates bearing his signature with new ones signed by his successor.

Source: ft.com, Tom Mitchell, January 5, 2021

China Court Sentences Ex-Banker to Death for $260M Bribes & Bigamy


BEIJING (AFP) — The former chairman of one of China’s largest state-controlled asset management firms was sentenced to death Tuesday for soliciting $260 million in bribes, corruption, and also bigamy.

Lai Xiaomin, a former Communist Party member, gave a detailed televised confession on state broadcaster CCTV last January, which showed footage of safes and cabinets stuffed with cash in a Beijing apartment allegedly belonging to him.

Lai had abused his position in attempting to obtain the vast sum, a court in the northern city of Tianjin said, describing the bribes as “extremely large” and labelling the circumstances “particularly serious.”

He had shown “extreme malicious intent,” the court ruling added.

The former chairman of the Hong Kong-listed China Huarong Asset Management Co. — a distressed debt group — was also found guilty of bigamy after living with a woman “as man and wife for long periods” outside of his marriage and fathering illegitimate children.

Huarong is one of four companies set up in 1999 to help clean up bad debt piles choking China’s banking system, and the company later expanded into investment, loan and property businesses.

Lai’s downfall began in April 2018 as investigators removed him from his job and stripped him of his party position.

He was also alleged to have used his position to embezzle over $3.8 million in public funds between 2009 and 2018.

During his TV confession, Lai said he “did not spend a single penny, and just kept it there… I did not dare to spend it.”

He had referred to the apartment where he kept the money as the “supermarket”, given his regular visits there to deposit cash.

Luxury cars, gold bars


CCTV showed luxury cars and gold bars reportedly accepted as bribes by Lai, who worked in the central bank and the China Banking Regulatory Commission prior to his leadership roles in Huarong.

The channel often broadcasts interviews with suspects admitting to crimes before they have appeared in court — a practice that has long been condemned by lawyers and rights organizations as forcing confessions under duress.

The court said Lai would have all personal assets confiscated and be stripped of his political rights.

Photos published by the court showed Lai standing up and facing the judge to be sentenced, flanked by two police officers wearing face masks.

The sentencing brings an end to one of the country’s biggest financial crime cases, and comes as Beijing takes an increasingly tough stance on corporate wrongdoing.

Critics say the wide-ranging anti-corruption campaign launched under President Xi Jinping has also served as a way to target his opponents and those of the Communist Party leadership.

Since Xi came to power, many high-ranking officials have been jailed, although only one is known to have been executed — Zhao Liping, who was convicted of homicide in 2016.

China keeps data on its use of the death penalty secret, although rights group Amnesty International estimates the country is the top executioner globally — with thousands executed and sentenced to death each year.

Three other senior Communist Party members have been sentenced to death but later given a reprieve.

The former head of Interpol, an ex-spy chief and a Xinjiang governor accused of “trading power for sex” are some of the other high-profile officials to suffer spectacular falls from grace in recent years in the anti-corruption purge.

Source: Agence France-Presse, Jing Xuan TENG, January 5, 2021


🚩 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.


Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!



"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

Most viewed (Last 7 days)

'No Warning': The Death Penalty In Japan

Stakes for wrongful convictions are high in Japan, where the death penalty has broad public support despite criticism over how it is carried out. Tokyo: Capital punishment in Japan is under scrutiny again after the world's longest-serving death row prisoner, Iwao Hakamada, was awarded $1.4 million in compensation this week following his acquittal last year in a retrial. Stakes for wrongful convictions are high in Japan, where the death penalty has broad public support despite international criticism over how it is carried out.

Louisiana's First Nitrogen Execution Reflects Broader Method Shift

Facing imminent execution by lethal gas earlier this week, Jessie Hoffman Jr. — a Louisiana man convicted of abducting, raping and murdering a 28-year-old woman in 1996 — went to court with a request: Please allow me to be shot instead. In a petition filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on March 16 seeking a stay of his execution by nitrogen hypoxia, a protocol that had yet to be tested in the state, Hoffman requested execution by firing squad as an alternative.

A second South Carolina death row inmate chooses execution by firing squad

Columbia, S.C. — A South Carolina death row inmate on Friday chose execution by firing squad, just five weeks after the state carried out its first death by bullets. Mikal Mahdi, who pleaded guilty to murder for killing a police officer in 2004, is scheduled to be executed April 11. Mahdi, 41, had the choice of dying by firing squad, lethal injection or the electric chair. He will be the first inmate to be executed in the state since Brad Sigmon chose to be shot to death on March 7. A doctor pronounced Sigmon dead less than three minutes after three bullets tore into his heart.

South Carolina | Spiritual adviser of condemned inmate: 'We're more than the worst thing we've done'

(RNS) — When 67-year-old Brad Sigmon was put to death on March 7 in South Carolina for the murder of his then-girlfriend's parents, it was the first time in 15 years that an execution in the United States had been carried out by a firing squad. United Methodist minister Hillary Taylor, Sigmon's spiritual adviser since 2020, said the multifaceted, months long effort to save Sigmon's life, and to provide emotional and spiritual support for his legal team, and the aftermath of his execution has been a "whirlwind" said Taylor, the director of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

USA | Federal death penalty possible for Mexican cartel boss behind 1985 DEA agent killing

Rafael Caro Quintero, extradited from Mexico in 2022, appeared in Brooklyn court as feds weigh capital charges for the torture and murder of Agent Enrique Camarena NEW YORK — The death penalty is on the table for notorious drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, the so-called “narco of narcos” who orchestrated the torture and murder of a DEA agent in 1985, according to federal prosecutors. “It is a possibility. The decision has not yet been made, but it is going through the process,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Saritha Komatireddy said in Brooklyn Federal Court Wednesday.

Execution date set for prisoner transferred to Oklahoma to face death penalty

An inmate who was transferred to Oklahoma last month to face the death penalty now has an execution date. George John Hanson, also known as John Fitzgerald Hanson, is scheduled to die on June 12 for the 1999 murder of 77-year-old Mary Bowles.  The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals on Tuesday set the execution date. The state’s Pardon and Parole Board has a tentative date of May 7 for Hanson’s clemency hearing, executive director Tom Bates said.

Inside Florida's Death Row: A dark cloud over the Sunshine State

Florida's death penalty system has faced numerous criticisms and controversies over the years - from execution methods to the treatment of Death Row inmates The Sunshine State remains steadfast in its enforcement of capital punishment, upholding a complex system that has developed since its reinstatement in 1976. Florida's contemporary death penalty era kicked off in 1972 following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Furman v. Georgia , which temporarily put a stop to executions across the country. Swiftly amending its laws, Florida saw the Supreme Court affirm the constitutionality of the death penalty in 1976's Gregg v. Georgia case.

Bangladesh | Botswana Woman Executed for Drug Trafficking

Dhaka, Bangladesh – Lesedi Molapisi, a Botswana national convicted of drug trafficking, was executed in Bangladesh on Friday, 21 March 2025. The 31-year-old was hanged at Dhaka Central Jail after exhausting all legal avenues to appeal her death sentence. Molapisi was arrested in January 2023 upon arrival at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka, where customs officials discovered 3.1 kilograms of heroin hidden in her luggage. Following a trial under Bangladesh’s Narcotics Control Act, she was sentenced to death in May 2024. Her execution was initially delayed due to political unrest in the country but was carried out last week.

Oklahoma executes Wendell Grissom

Grissom used some of his last words on Earth to apologize to everyone he hurt and said that he prays they can find forgiveness for their own sake. As for his execution, he said it was a mercy. Oklahoma executed Wendell Arden Grissom on Thursday for the murder of 23-year-old Amber Matthews in front of her best friend’s two young daughters in 2005.  Grissom, 56, was executed by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester and pronounced dead at 10:13 a.m. local time, becoming the first inmate to be put to death by the state in 2025 and the ninth in the United States this year. 

564 People On Death Row In India, Highest Since The Turn Of The Century

In 90% of of all death penalty sentences in 2024, trial courts imposed sentences in the absence of adequate information about the accused, finds a recent report Bengaluru: Following the uproar and the widespread protests after the August 2024 rape and murder of a medical professional in Kolkata’s RG Kar hospital, there were demands for death penalty for the accused. The state government passed the Aparajita Woman and Child (West Bengal Criminal Laws Amendment) Bill 2024 (awaiting presidential assent) which included mandatory death sentence for rape which results in death of the victim or if the victim is left in a vegetative state, despite such a mandatory sentence being unconstitutional.