Prosecutors crack down on executive crime

Prosecutors in Minhang District received 318 cases in which the rights of enterprises or entrepreneurs were violated in the past two years, along with 160 crimes committed by firms or executives, according to a white paper issued on Monday.

The former mainly involved counterfeit sales, credit card fraud and embezzlement, while the latter included tax fraud, illegal fundraising and bribery.

To deal with problems resulting from an executive committing a crime, the Minhang District People's Procuratorate has established a professional manager trusteeship system with the district association of industry and commerce.

Under the system, the association will send professional managers to the company involved to help it run normally while the case is investigated.

"The arrest of entrepreneurs who commit serious crimes may greatly affect the enterprises' operations," said Sun Jing, chief procurator of the procuratorate. "To ensure the normal operation of these firms, we will entrust the association of industry and commerce to send professional managers from other companies who are familiar with the industry to help the firms."

So far there had been no case that required the implementation of the system, Sun said.

Last year, the procuratorate issued 27 procuratorial proposals to administrative supervision departments and companies and all were accepted.

In one case, an unemployed man called Huang took advantage of bugs in an online platform to steal the personal information and contacts of schoolgirls. He then pretended to be an employer who could offer them jobs with the intention of luring them to a meeting and molesting them, prosecutors said. 

Huang was sentenced to 14 months in jail by a court last year.

Prosecutors found the online platform had failed to properly check the employers registered on it. So they filed a procuratorial proposal to the platform provider, asking it to strengthen checks on the employers and require more documents such as business licenses and identity cards.

Measures should be taken to prevent the leakage of job seekers' information and tougher screening should be given to the content of recruitment ads. Those looking for minor workers, child or teen models that are under age should be deleted and reported to authorities.