Lawsuit Involving Bribery Preceded Bank Resignation (original) (raw)
Business|Lawsuit Involving Bribery Preceded Bank Resignation
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- March 22, 2005
SHANGHAI, March 21 - The most recent prominent Chinese executive to resign in the wake of bribery or corruption accusations is Zhang Enzhao, chairman of one of the country's big four government-owned banks, the China Construction Bank.
Mr. Zhang quit last week for "personal reasons," according to a statement from the bank, which is preparing for a large initial public stock offering, probably later this year.
But last weekend, the state-controlled news media were the first to report that a Chinese company had filed a lawsuit in California in December, accusing Mr. Zhang, a 40-year veteran of the China Construction Bank, of accepting a $1 million bribe from an American information technology company.
According to the complaint, in May 2002, just four months after Mr. Zhang took office as president, he traveled to the United States for an expenses-paid golf outing at Pebble Beach in California given by an executive of Alltel Information Services, since renamed Fidelity Information Services.
Later, the complaint said, in exchange for steering business to Alltel, it passed a $1 million bribe to Mr. Zhang through a Hong Kong company. Alltel was also accused of helping pay for university education in London for Mr. Zhang's son and for his wife's travel there.
The suit was filed by Grace and Digital Information Technology, a Beijing company that said the bribe deprived it of an earlier contract worth $58 million. Fidelity National Financial of Jacksonville, Fla., which acquired Alltel Information in 2003, referred calls to Alltel, the former owner. Alltel said it was investigating the accusations.
It is unclear whether Mr. Zhang's resignation was related to the lawsuit, but Jinshu Zhang, a lawyer who helped draft the complaint, said the legal papers would have arrived in China in mid-February, about a month before Mr. Zhang's departure.
In January 2002, Mr. Zhang succeeded Wang Xuebing, who resigned from the top post at China Construction Bank after charges that he accepted bribes while serving as chairman of another large government-owned bank, the Bank of China. He is now serving a 12-year prison sentence.
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