A disgraced banker involved in one of China’s biggest financial-corruption cases drove around with trunkfuls of cash bribes that he later stashed in an apartment he called “the supermarket,” according to a report.
“I got the money and just left it there, just like making regular trips to the supermarket,” said Lai Xiaomin, the former chairman of distressed-debt investor China Huarong Asset Management, Bloomberg News reported.
More than 200 million yuan, or $29 million, was eventually discovered by authorities in the pad.
Lai — who is facing corruption charges in China — reportedly made the revelation in a documentary that aired Monday on Chinese state TV. The film included shots of metal cabinets in Lai’s apartment in Beijing crammed with thick stacks of light-pink bills, according to the Chinese news outlet Caixin Global.
Lai confessed on camera that he preferred to take payments in cash and drove trunkfuls of bills to the apartment, Bloomberg said.
“I didn’t spend a cent. It’s all confiscated in the end,” Lai reportedly said.
The five-part documentary series, which started airing Sunday, is part of President Xi Jinping’s public campaign to show the government is cracking down on corporate corruption in China.
Lai was arrested in November 2018 and has been accused of taking more than 1.6 billion yuan, or nearly $232 million, in bribes, according to news reports. He allegedly took the money through his positions as an ex-Communist Party chief and head of Huarong, according to Chinese state media, which called his financial corruption case the “worst” in China in more than seven decades.
“We have dealt with a number of cases in the financial sector, but none was as shocking as Lai’s case in the amount, degree of damage and plots and means of crimes,” Chen Qingpu, the deputy director of the Chinese Communist Party’s anti-corruption body, reportedly said in the documentary.