Li Xiaokun reports in the China Daily:
A federal jury in Las Vegas on Friday convicted two former principals of China’s largest bank, who have been resident in the United States for the past seven years, of embezzlement and money laundering in the biggest case of its kind since 1949.
Xu Chaofan and Xu Guojun were discovered to have masterminded the “Kaiping case” of 2001, in which they defrauded the Stated-owned Bank of China of $485 million over the previous 10 years. The men’s wives were also found guilty of the crime, the US attorney’s office in Las Vegas said.
The two Xus and Yu Zhendong, who has held management positions at the Bank of China branch in Kaiping, Guangdong province, engineered their “escape hatch” to the US since 1991 by marrying three unsuspecting women with US citizenship.
Xu Chaofan and Xu Guojun answered charges of racketeering, money laundering, international transportation of stolen property and passport fraud in a three-month trial, local media reported. They are to be sentenced on Nov 24.
