April 26, 2013
Translated by Chi Yi

A high-level executive from the Tianjin branch of China Mobile Communications Corporation (CMCC) was taken away by the authorities for questioning on Apr 23, according to a report in today's China Business News (CBN).

According to the CBN report, the employee at the Tianjin branch of China Mobile had already been questioned and investigated by authorities in the past.

A unnamed source who works in the telecommunications industry told a reporter from CBN that "The case is probably related to his work in another province on Service Providers (SP). The SP sector is a breeding ground for corruption but it's also the sector in which you're most likely to be caught."

CBN also reported that four other China Mobile employees, mid-level managers from Inner Mongolia and Guangdong, had been detained on the same day. The Guangdong official was back at work a day after being taken away for investigation, but the situation in relation to the other four is still unclear.

Over the past four years, twelve high-level officials at China Mobile have been removed because of corruption charges following the 2009 arrest of Zhang Chunjiang (張春江), the former vice-chairman of CMCC and the former party head of China Mobile Communications, the state-owned parent of China Mobile.

Mr Zhang was later charged with accepting more than 7.5 million yuan in bribes and was handed a suspended death sentence in July 2011.

The corruption scandal also resulted in high-level officials from the Sichuan and Chongqing branches of the company being charged with corruption and handed suspended death sentences.

The most recent case involved Lu Xiangdong, a vice-president and executive director in charge of development strategy, planning, construction and procurement, who stepped down from his position in March last year after becoming implicated in a a police investigation.

According to the CBN's source, most of the corruption cases involve "power-for-money" deals (權(quán)錢交易) related to either data or SP services or the purchasing of equipment.

CMCC on State Council Black List

According to the CBN report, at an internal meeting of the State Council in January, several centrally-administered state-owned enterprises were criticized by name for "waste and extravagance" (奢侈浪費), "nepotism" (用人唯親) and "mismanagement" (管理不嚴(yán)). China Mobile was one of the five companies to appear on this black list.

According to CBN, the Natioanl Auditing Office (NAO) will release a report into accounting problems at some of China's largest and most powerful state-owned companies over the coming days.

Every year the NAO selects a few centrally-administered SOEs and goes through their books. Over the past two years, the auditing office has uncovered dozens of problems at the other two state-owned telecommunications giants in China - China Unicom (中國聯(lián)通) and China Telecom (中國電信).

According to someone close to the NAO, this year the auditing office looked into 9 centrally-controlled SOEs, including China Mobile. The report is said to have identified 178 problems at all of these companies, one third of these problems are related to China Mobile.

Links and Sources
China Business News:中移動腐敗案繼續(xù)發(fā)酵 4年“落馬”12人
Economic Observer Online:Chongqing\'s China Mobile Corruption
Economic Observer Online: Huawei Implicated in China Mobile Corruption Case