Banker gave information but was sentenced to death in China for over $151 million in bribes

• A court in Tianjin on Tuesday sentenced a former state-owned company executive to death for corruption.
• Bai Tianhui was found guilty of accepting bribes worth $151 million.
• Authorities said he helped solve several other crimes, but would not get a lighter sentence for that.

A former banker at a Chinese state-owned asset management company has been sentenced to death for corruption, a Tianjin court announced Tuesday.

Bai Tianhui, former chief executive of China Huarong International Holdings, was found guilty of accepting bribes worth $151 million between 2014 and 2018, the court wrote in a statement.

Authorities said Bai abused his position as the holder of various positions within his company and accepted bribes related to project acquisition and business financing.

The court said Bai had accepted “extremely huge” bribes and that “the circumstances of the crime were extremely serious and the social impact was extremely bad.”

It adds that the disgraced former manager cooperated with authorities to help expose and solve other “major crimes.”

Although Bai made what the court called “great contributions,” the court said the scale of his crimes was so great that he would not receive a lighter sentence.

Executions for corruption in China are generally rare, and those who have received such sentences are generally considered to have cost the country considerable resources through their crimes. Bai is the second former Huarong executive to be sentenced to death.

Lai Xiaomin, who was chairman of the company, was executed in 2021 after being convicted of corruption involving approximately $277 million. He was also accused of bigamy and fathering two illegitimate children.

A court in Tianjin sentenced Lai to death on January 5 of that year, and he was executed at the end of the month after his appeal was rejected.

State media did not say whether Bai intended to appeal, but it is also rare for death sentences in China to be overturned. A former vice mayor, Zhang Zhongsheng, was sentenced to life in prison after appealing his death sentence for $160 million in bribes.

All of Bai's personal property will be confiscated, the Tianjian court announced Tuesday.

Bai and several of his top colleagues, including Lai, were investigated by China's corruption watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, in 2018.

Four other Huarong leaders remain to be tried.

Bai's execution comes amid a new campaign to root out corruption in China's financial system, with the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reporting that more than 30 top financial executives and state officials were stopped in 2024 alone.

The anti-corruption measures come in the shadow of Chinese leader Xi Jinping's stated ambition to make China a “financial superpower” and his decade-long campaign to root out corruption in the country.

Alongside the crackdown, state media regularly produce documentaries highlighting the financial crimes of those arrested on corruption charges.

Lai appears in a film released in 2020, which features footage of a secret safe in an apartment filled with money that his friends called the “supermarket”. Bai also appears in the documentary.