What’s new: Guo Hong, a former banking regulator, has been expelled from the Communist Party and removed from public office for legal and disciplinary violations including accepting bribes, an official announcement said Wednesday.
Guo was arrested in October and prosecuted in a Tianjin court in November on charges including accepting “particularly huge sums in bribes,” according to previous official statements.
The background: Guo, about 50, had worked in a variety of positions in the now-defunct China Banking Regulatory Commission and the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC), according to public information.
He was appointed head of the CBIRC’s Rural Small and Medium-sized Banking Institution Supervision Department in 2018, and was removed from that position in April this year after turning himself in to authorities.
China has stepped up anti-corruption efforts in recent years. An article published by the country’s top anti-graft agency in September said that since October 2017, it had initiated 93 cases involving officials in the banking and insurance regulatory system, almost tripling the number of cases in the previous five years.
Related: Senior Rural Banking Regulator Turns Himself In to Graft Investigators
Contact reporter Zhang Yukun (yukunzhang@caixin.com) and editor Heather Mowbray (heathermowbray@caixin.com)
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