Jan 6, 2021
The bigamy conviction got a lot of the attention but Lai Xiaomin received a death sentence on Tuesday over a much more serious issue troubling China.
Lai oversaw China Huarong Asset Management Co. from 2012 until he ran into trouble in 2018. He was found guilty of receiving 1.79 billion yuan ($277.3 million) in bribes, with bigamy thrown in for good measure. Still, capital punishment for this kind of white-collar crime is unusual, legal experts say. Wu Xiaohui, former chairman of Anbang Insurance Group Co., whose clean-up is costing Beijing billions of dollars, was sentenced to 18 years in jail over a $10 billion fraud in 2018.
In another groundbreaking decision, the Hong Kong court in
Re Ando Credit Ltd [2020] HKCFI 2775, has appointed provisional liquidators over a Hong Kong-incorporated investment manager for the express purpose of allowing the liquidators to seek recognition in the Mainland. The judgment is the latest in a series of judgments facilitating cross-border recognition and enforcement of assets and takes the degree of potential cooperation envisaged to a new level.
Application unopposed
The petitioner had applied for the appointment of provisional liquidators over Ando Credit Limited (the company) for the purposes of seeking recognition from the Shenzhen Bankruptcy Court. The application was unopposed. The Honorable Mr. Justice Harris commented that he thought it unnecessary to go into the nature of the underlying debt or the background to the application.