Shi Ting (’03) writes for the South China Morning Post on corrupt officials fleeing China with their pilfered riches:

The international pursuit of fugitive Chinese bankers has drawn fresh attention to an exodus of corrupt financial officials and highlighted China’s uphill battle in cleaning up a banking system riddled with corruption and mismanagement.

According to reports in the official media, around 4,000 officials - most of them bankers, fund managers and officials at financial institutions - have pocketed billions of yuan before fleeing the country in recent years.

Gao Shan , former head of a Bank of China sub-branch in Harbin , allegedly siphoned a billion yuan from customers’ accounts to Canada between 2002 and 2004.

The scandal only surfaced when Northeast Expressway, a highway company, discovered in January 2005 that 3 million yuan was missing from its account. It led to further investigations which found as much as 800 million yuan of clients’ deposits were unaccounted for.

See the full article here.