China sentenced Zhang Hongli, a former banker at Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., to death with a reprieve for taking bribes, as authorities maintained their tight grip on the $67 trillion financial sector. The banker, also known as Lee Zhang, was handed the penalty with a two-year reprieve on Wednesday at a court in Zhejiang province, China Central Television reported. All his assets will be foreclosed, it said. Zhang joins a series of other high-profile bankers in the past year who have also been sentenced to death with a reprieve. Hundreds of financial officials and executives have been caught in Beijing’s sweeping anti-graft push that has shown no signs of easing since 2021. China first opened a corruption investigation into Zhang, a former vice president at ICBC, in late 2023. He was later arrested in May last year and charged with bribery in August. Investigations found Zhang had taken 177 million yuan worth of bribes between 2011 and 2022, in exchange for facilitating loans and arranging jobs for others, according to CCTV. Zhang joined ICBC, the world’s biggest bank by assets, in 2010 as an executive vice president from Deutsche Bank. That made him the first banker from a foreign lender to be hired to a senior executive role at one of China’s state-owned banks, according to state media. He resigned from the bank in 2018 due to a family issue and joined private equity firm Hopu Investment Management Co. as a co-chairman, according to local media. Zhang’s time at ICBC overlapped in part with Li Xiaopeng, former chairman and party secretary of China Everbright Group and Cong Lin, a former executive at China Renaissance Holdings Ltd. Both had been implicated in the graft campaign. Other financial executives that China sentenced to death with reprieve include Liu Liange, former Chairman of Bank of China Ltd. and Tian Huiyu, the former president of China Merchants Bank Co. ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
China has sentenced former ICBC banker Zhang to death, but with a reprieve.
