Court finds Sun Guofeng took $2.94 million in bribes and conducted inside trading
A former senior official of the People’s Bank of China has received a long prison sentence for taking bribes, leaking state secrets and insider trading. A court in Tianjin sentenced Sun Guofeng, former head of the central bank’s monetary policy department, to 16 years and six months in jail. It sentenced Sun on July 27, but the prosecutor only revealed the news at a December 28 press conference, several media outlets reported. The court also fined Sun 13.1 million yuan ($1.85 million) for his offences. Authorities launched a probe into Sun and removed him from his post in May 2022. In recent years, Chinese president Xi Jinping has launched an anti-corruption campaign against the financial sector, which has seen a number of senior officials coming under investigation. Between 2002 and 2020, Sun used his position to help others obtain policy information in return for illicit payments worth 21 million yuan, the reports said. In particular, the court found he leaked confidential policy information to others between 2014 and 2019 to help them make profits through relevant transactions.
Between July and August 2014, Sun obtained inside information on a Shanghai-listed company’s merger-and-acquisition plans, and bought 9.29 million yuan worth of its shares. Trading of the company’s shares was suspended between September 2014 and March 2015 as it underwent asset restructuring. Sun illegally made over 11 million yuan when he sold all of the company’s shares he held in June 2015, after it had resumed trading. Sun, 51, joined the PBoC in 1996 and had spent most of his career in the monetary policy department. He was director of the PBoC’s finance research institute between October 2016 and August 2018, before becoming head of its monetary policy department. Sun holds a PhD in economics from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has published dozens of academic papers and two English language books on China’s monetary policy and financial reforms. Sun was a visiting fellow at Stanford University between 2003 and 2004 and a visiting professor at Princeton University in 2017.
Senior figures prosecuted
In September, prosecutors charged Fan Yifei, a former PBoC deputy governor, with taking bribes. He was stripped of his post in late 2022, after being expelled from the party earlier that year. In November, Sun Deshun, former president of the state-owned China Citic Bank, was given a suspended death sentence by a court for accepting bribes of 1 billion yuan, China Daily reported. The punishment is typically commuted to life imprisonment after two years
