BEIJING (AP) – The former head of a Chinese state-owned asset management company was executed on Friday on charges of taking bribes on an unusually severe sentence for a recent corruption case.
Lai Xiaomin, of the Chinese company Huarong Asset Management Co., was among thousands of officials caught up in a long campaign against the graft led by President Xi Jinping. Others, including China’s former insurance regulator, have been sentenced to prison.
Lai, 58, was killed by a court in Tianjin, east of Beijing, the government announced.
The second intermediate people’s court in Tianjin ruled in January that the death was justified because Lai took “especially huge” bribes to make investments, offer construction contracts, help with promotions and provide other favors.
Lai demanded or collected 1.8 billion yuan ($ 260 million) over a decade, the court said. A bribe was said to exceed 600 million yuan ($ 93 million). He was also convicted of embezzling more than 25 million yuan ($ 4 million) and founding a second family while still married to his first wife.
Lai “endangered national financial security and financial stability,” he said in a comment on the state TV website.
The death penalty “was his responsibility, and he deserved it,” the comment said.
Most death sentences imposed by Chinese courts are suspended for two years and are usually commuted to life. Death sentences without the possibility of redemption are rare.
Huarong is one of four entities created in the 1990s to buy unprofitable loans from government banks. They expanded into banking, insurance, real estate financing and other fields.
Lai was investigated by the ruling Communist Party anti-corruption watchdog in 2018 and expelled from the party later that year.
Lai was also accused of squandering public money, illegally organizing banquets, engaging in sex with various women and taking bribes, the anti-corruption agency said in 2018.
Investigators confiscated hundreds of millions of yuan (tens of millions of dollars) in cash from Lai’s properties, Chinese business news magazine Caixin reported in 2018.