'Naked Official'

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Barbara Demick and David Pierson, China Steps up Efforts to Keep Officials From Leaving Country. Los Angeles Times, June 6, 2012.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nati ... d-official-20120606,0,1104894.story
  
Quote:

"When anticorruption investigators started probing China's high-speed rail program, they discovered that one of the Railway Ministry's chief engineers owned a five-bedroom, five-bath Mediterranean-style house in Los Angeles County. Zhang Shuguang had bought the $840,000 house in the city of Walnut nine years earlier when he was reportedly earning just $365 a month. His wife and daughter had moved there, which led investigators to suspect that he intended to skip out of China to join them.

"The practice has become so endemic inChina's officialdom that the Communist Party's top disciplinary body is enacting an 'anti-flight' program to keep people in place. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection last month reviewed ways to keep people from moving abroad, including confiscating passports and registering family members living overseas as a way to monitor who might be kept out of high positions.

"Chinese prosecutors say 18,487 officials, including executives from state-owned companies, have been caught during the last 12 years while allegedly trying to flee overseas with ill-gotten gains, according to this week's issue of China Economic Weekly. The magazine described the typical 'naked official' as a man in his 50s who was approaching retirement and had accumulated at least $13 million.