CHINA: A man accused of the biggest embezzlement in recent Chinese history was extradited from Las Vegas to Beijing yesterday.
The return of Yu Zhendong, a banker said to have stolen $485 million from his institution, is a sign of growing Sino-American co-operation in law enforcement, which is likely to alarm the hundreds - possibly thousands - of other former Chinese officials who have escaped corruption charges by fleeing to the US.
Formerly a safe haven, the US is no longer welcoming enemies of the Chinese Communist Party as unreservedly as in the past. As the relations between the two countries grow warmer, President Bush recently ordered US immigration authorities to bar any public official suspected of corruption in China.
Even though such crimes are rife in a society that mixes rigid political control with get-rich-quick capitalist economics, Mr Yu's alleged crime is on an unprecedented scale.
According to the US embassy in Beijing, he is accused of conspiring with two fellow employees to embezzle the money from the Bank of China, one of the country's four biggest financial institutions, between 1992 and 2001.
The three men are said to have used fake Hong Kong travel documents to flee to the US. Mr Yu (41) was arrested in December 2002 and charged with racketeering. His alleged partners Xu Guojun and Xu Chaofan are still at large.
Although the US and China have no extradition treaty, American officials agreed to surrender him on the condition that he would not be tortured or given the death penalty, which is common in China even for less serious corruption cases.
His handover by FBI agents and US immigration officials was broadcast by China's state television, which hailed the event as a "success in bilateral legal co-operation".
After years of mutual mistrust, law enforcement officials in the two countries have worked together on several recent high-profile cases.
Last May an 18-month joint police operation ended with the arrest of 20 people involved in one of the world's biggest heroin-smuggling rings. Two months later Beijing extradited a suspected criminal to the US for the first time.
China's priority is to track down the huge numbers of corrupt officials who escape overseas every year with vast sums. One newspaper estimated that almost 15,000 absconded or disappeared in the first half of 2003.
In the past five years prosecutors are said to have recovered only a small proportion of the more than $5 billion stolen money sent overseas. Many of those who flee are senior members of the Communist party.
Although the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, has announced a crackdown on corruption, the problem continues to dent the party's public credibility.