Beijing's Chaoyang district records 21% rise in financial prosecutions

Beijing's Chaoyang district as a big financial development area of the capital has seen a sharp increase in the number of financial crimes since the beginning of this year, according to a prosecuting authority's report.

The report issued by the Chaoyang District People's Procuratorate on Tuesday said the district's prosecutors have accused 1,467 people of financial crimes, such as fraud and illegal fund-raising, by initiating 555 prosecutions in the first 11 months of this year. The prosecution number witnessed a 21.2 percent increase year-on-year, it said.

"Most of the prosecutions were related to illegal fund-raising," said Wu Chunmei, deputy procurator of the procuratorate. "We treated such cases as priority, because the involved money was extremely large."

For example, the involved money in about 18 percent of such illegal fund-raising cases solved by the district's prosecutors was over 100 million yuan ($14.3 million), Wu said.

"Besides, we also solved a rising number of financial irregularities or offenses in private equity and online loan from January to November," she said. Some of the cases have been ruled by the courts and defendants have been penalized, the report said.

For instance, two defendants, surnamed Zhao and Liu, were given life imprisonment after they illegally collected 500 million yuan from more than 100 residents by falsifying financial businesses, such as stocks and futures, it said, adding all private properties of the two convicts were also confiscated.

Prosecutors from the district said a lot of residents easily fall into illegal fund-raising traps, as it's difficult to distinguish between real financial projects and fake ones, and some people don't make sensible decision when they are promised huge returns.

The prosecutors asked people to be more careful before buying financial projects, and called for government departments to increase supervision in the financial market and take advantage of technologies to build risk warning systems.