The president of China’s third-largest bank has been detained, local media reported on Monday — the most senior bank official to be swept up in President Xi Jinping’s sweeping anti-corruption campaign.
Zhang Yun, president, vice-chairman, and deputy Communist party secretary of Agricultural Bank of China had been “taken away to assist an investigation”, Sina Finance and QQ Finance reported, using a known euphemism for corruption arrests. QQ cited an AgBank employee saying that Mr Zhang had been arrested on Friday and that executives had held a meeting late into the night to discuss a response.
Since ascending to the top of China’s political system in late 2012, President Xi Jinping has engaged in a ferocious anti-corruption campaign that has gone further and continued for longer than any since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. More than 100,000 people have been indicted for graft, while the party has banned cadres from fine dining, luxury hotels and, most recently, golf.