China auditor to check big banks
BEIJING: China’s top audit office will turn its spotlight on one of the most problematic state banks as well as the country’s banking regulator in its latest round of checks into top institutions.
The National Audit Office, increasingly held in high esteem across China for exposing rampant corruption in major government offices, had also pledged to begin making its reports public, state media said on Thursday.
“The National Audit Office will strive to make public the results of all audits and investigations, except state secrets, business secrets and other secret materials,” auditor-general Li Jinhua was quoted by the Xinhua news agency as saying. Li, who exposed corruption at former power monopoly State Power Corp. and the top sports administration, was named as the country’s “top economic personage” last year by state-run China Central Television.
Corruption, virtually wiped out in the years after the Communists came to power in 1949, has roared back in the wake of economic reforms introduced in the late 1970s.
China’s leaders have warned that the Communist Party faces self-destruction if it fails to crack down on graft, a scourge that has toppled imperial dynasties. In the first 11 months of last year, the audit office had uncovered nearly $3 billion worth of misused government funds, Xinhua said.
This year, along with Agricultural Bank of China and the China Banking Regulatory Commission, auditors would look into the books of government unemployment and sanitation funds and about a dozen top state-run companies, the People’s Daily said.
Agricultural Bank is considered to be in the worst shape of China’s Big Four state lenders, with some analysts reckoning that well more than a quarter of its loans may have gone sour. —Reuters
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