low-level government accountant: his testimony

Li Huabo, Corrupt Chinese Bureaucrat or Fall Guy?

By Shai Oster on March 28, 2013

 

Photograph by Kxx for Bloomberg Businessweek

 Li agreed to be photographed provided he could obscure his identity

On a typically humid Singapore afternoon, Li Huabo leads visitors through the gates of his luxury condo complex—past the swimming pool, Jacuzzi, and reflexology center—to his three-bedroom apartment. He puts a stack of files on the dark marble dining room table while his wife gets juice from the kitchen, which looks out on a nature preserve. Li, 51, is stocky, with a boyish face framed by dark wire-rimmed glasses and black hair. He’s as ordinary as a man could be. You’d never know he’s facing charges related to alleged crimes in his native China, where Li claims he could have received the death penalty.
For nearly 30 years, Li worked as a low-level government accountant in a poor county next to Lake Poyang in southeastern China’s Jiangxi province. He supplemented his meager functionary’s salary by running businesses on the side—a practice that’s officially prohibited but nonetheless commonplace among Chinese officials, many of whom have used their connections to amass huge fortunes in the private sector. Two years ago, Li quit his job stamping checks, sold his share of an oil refinery, unloaded his pink five-story villa, and moved his money and family out of China. Like other newly rich bureaucrats, he’d yearned to move somewhere safe, he says, where he wouldn’t have to worry about Communist Party crackdowns, health-care scares, or pollution.
As he recounts his story, Li pauses to fetch a heavy gold Rolex—one of the last tokens of success he owns. In March 2011, one month after arriving in Singapore, he was arrested and accused of being the ringleader of an elaborate scheme to embezzle more than 90 million yuan ($14.5 million) from the Chinese government and funnel part of the money through Singaporean banks. Singapore police acted after a tip-off from Li’s remittance agent and a request from Beijing via Interpol. Although the two countries don’t have an extradition treaty, they share an interest in stemming the flow of dirty Chinese money into the island nation. Li claims interrogators told him that if he cooperated, they’d try to help. If he didn’t, he could face a far worse fate back home.

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Li refused and now faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted on three counts of banking stolen funds totaling S$182,770 ($146,771). A Singapore judge is expected to hand down a verdict on April 5. These days, Li spends most of his time sitting at home, living off the monthly check of S$4,000 the Singapore government has sent him since early 2011, when it froze all his bank accounts and property. His former co-workers framed him, he repeats like a mantra. “They want to hurt me,” he says.
There’s no shortage of numbers about corruption in China. How reliable these numbers are is another matter. Last year prosecutors investigated 47,338 cases of official misconduct, 5 percent more than the previous year, and recovered 8.8 billion yuan. Despite strict currency controls, money is still getting out of China. Since the 1990s around 18,000 officials and state employees have left with some 800 billion yuan, according to a central bank report leaked online in 2011. Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based anti-money-laundering watchdog group, estimates that $3.79 trillion in illicit funds flowed out of China from 2000 to 2011.
While the wealth and misbehavior of senior Communist Party officials and their families have received international attention, the more insidious forms of official corruption take place at the local level. Tales of corruption have become the stuff of popular roman à clef novels such as The Diary of Government Official Hou Weidong, written by a midlevel sanitation official, which describes a culture of endemic graft. Rarely, however, do outsiders hear directly from bureaucrats caught up in corruption cases. Li told his story to Bloomberg Businessweek during a four-hour interview at his home in Singapore. He maintains he’s innocent of the charges against him—a fall guy, not a crook. His story provides a glimpse of the pervasiveness of influence peddling at all levels of China’s bureaucracy and shows how difficult it is to stop abuses that have become an accepted part of doing business.


Poyang is one of China’s poorest counties. It’s named after what was the country’s largest freshwater lake, before drought and dams shrunk the lake from 4,000 square kilometers to just 200. Government jobs are coveted in a place like Poyang. Last year a record 1.5 million candidates nationwide applied online for 20,000 civil service jobs, state-run news agency Xinhua reported.