An ex-banker was sentenced to death in China for taking $151 million in bribes even after he gave tip-offs to authorities

• A court in Tianjin sentenced a former executive for a state-owned firm to death for bribery on Tuesday.
• Bai Tianhui was found guilty of accepting bribes worth $151 million.

A former senior banker for a Chinese state-owned asset management firm has been sentenced to death for bribery, a court in Tianjin said on Tuesday.

Bai Tianhui, an ex-general manager of China Huarong International Holdings, was found guilty of taking bribes worth $151 million from 2014 to 2018, the court wrote in an announcement.

Authorities said Bai had abused his position as a holder of various appointments at his firm and accepted bribes involved with project acquisitions and corporate financing.

The court said Bai took "extremely huge" bribes and that the "circumstances of the crime were extremely serious, and the social impact was extremely bad."

It added that the disgraced former manager cooperated with authorities to help expose and solve other "major crimes."

Despite Bai providing what the court said were "great contributions," it said the magnitude of his crimes was so great he would not receive a lighter sentence.

Execution for corruption in China is generally rare, and those who have received such a sentence are usually deemed to have cost the country considerable resources through their crimes. Bai is the second former Huarong executive to be handed the death sentence.

Lai Xiaomin, who was chairman of the firm, was executed in 2021 after being found guilty of graft involving about $277 million. He was also charged with bigamy and fathering two illegitimate children.

A Tianjin court sentenced Lai to death on January 5 of that year, and he was executed by the end of the month after his appeal was rejected.

State media didn't say if Bai intends to appeal, but it's also rare for death sentences in China to be overturned. One former vice-mayor, Zhang Zhongsheng, was given life imprisonment after appealing his death sentence for bribes involving $160 million.

All of Bai's personal property will be confiscated, the Tianjian court said on Tuesday.

Bai and several of his top colleagues, including Lai, were put under investigation by China's graft watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, in 2018.

Four other Huarong executives are still scheduled for trial.

Bai's execution comes amid a renewed push to stamp out corruption in China's financial system, with Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reporting that over 30 top financial executives and state officials were arrested in 2024 alone.

The anti-graft measures fall under the shadow of Chinese leader Xi Jinping's announced ambition for China to be a "financial superpower" and his decadelong campaign to weed out corruption in the country.

In conjunction with the crackdown, state media regularly produces documentaries highlighting the financial crimes of those caught for corruption.

Lai appears in one film that aired in 2020, which features footage of a secret vault in an apartment filled with cash that his friends called the "supermarket." Bai also appears in the documentary.