Chinese bank chiefs stand trial in US
By Liu Chang (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-02-11 06:28

The trial of two former presidents of a branch of the Bank of China (BOC) charged with embezzling US$485 million with the help of another former bank president is due to start on February 27 in Nevada, the United States.

The Beijing News daily reported the date for the trial of Guangdong-based Xu Chaofan and Xu Guojun was set at a hearing on Friday, local time.

A woman walks past a branch of Bank of China in Shanghai in this photo taken in December, 2005. [newsphoto]

The pair declined to be repatriated to China, and plan to plead not guilty.

Chinese officials and law experts welcomed the indictment of Xu Chaofan and Xu Guojun last month. The case should serve as a warning to the 4,000 or so Chinese officials that have fled abroad suspected of stealing a combined US$50 billion, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

A US grand jury indicted the two bank officials, former bosses of the Kaiping branch in South China's Guangdong Province of the BOC and their wives and one other relative on 15 counts of racketeering, money laundering and fraud.

They stand accused of transferring or conducting business using embezzled funds, and forging passports and visas, according to the indictment.

Xu Guojun was arrested in Kansas in September 2004, while Xu Chaofan was apprehended in Oklahoma in the following month.

"It is an important co-operation operation between the law enforcement departments of the two countries," said Gong Xiaobing, head of the Judicial Aid & Foreign Affairs Department of China's Justice Ministry, Xinhua News Agency reported.

He said co-operation between China and the US succeeded in bringing in Yu Zhendong, a third banker from the Kaiping branch convicted on corruption charges, from the United States in April 2004.

"The Justice Ministry will support and encourage further joint efforts between the two countries," Gong said, adding that legal collaboration between the two countries had been working well since 2000, when they signed a treaty of judicial aid.

The three former bank presidents arrived in the US in 2001, suspected of being behind massive losses recorded at the BOC one of China's four biggest State-owned commercial banks.

Yu was sentenced to 12 years in prison by a federal court in Las Vegas in 2004 over money laundering, entering the US with forged documents and immigration fraud.

He was returned to China two months later after Beijing promised he would not face the death penalty. This was the first time a Chinese citizen suspected of committing a severe economic crime had been extradited from the US.

Yu's trial at the Jiangmen Intermediate People's Court in Guangdong began in August last year, and the case continues.