One of the more memorable articles in the Hong Kong press of late featured a diagram comparing the height of a stack Rmb100 bills worth Rmb200m with the height of a well-known skyscraper in Causeway Bay. It was meant to demonstrate the amount of currency reportedly found in one of the homes of Wei Pengyuan – a deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission’s coal department.
“It marks the largest amount of money in cash we have seized from a corrupt official during a single operation since 1949,” said Xu Jinhui, an official from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate overseeing graft cases, according to the South China Morning Post, the Hong Kong newspaper. The procuratorate has identified more than 500 allegedly corrupt officials who, it says, have fled abroad.
China’s anti-corruption drive has found a lot of allegedly ill gotten gains. But the campaign may also be spurring a growing number of wealthy Chinese to send their money out of the country – accelerating capital outflows at a time when concerns about weaker growth are also making the Chinese currency less attractive.