Former Deputy Governor of Zhejiang Province and Vice Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), Zhu Congjiu, known as the “Billion-RMB Deputy Governor,” has been sentenced to life imprisonment after falling from grace a year and a half ago. He was accused of accepting bribes totaling more than 105 million RMB.
On November 19th, the Intermediate People’s Court in Ganzhou City, Jiangxi Province, publicly announced the verdict of the first instance trial. Zhu Congjiu, former member of the Zhejiang CPPCC Party Committee and Vice Chairman, was sentenced to life imprisonment for bribery and had all his personal assets confiscated.
According to the court, from 2002 to 2022, Zhu Congjiu took advantage of his positions as General Manager of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Assistant Chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission in charge of the Issuance Supervision Department, Deputy Governor of Zhejiang Province, and member of the Zhejiang CPPCC Party Committee to provide assistance to relevant entities and individuals in matters such as company listings, financing loans, and corporate operations. He directly or through intermediaries received a total of over 105 million RMB in assets.
Zhu Congjiu was removed from office in May 2023, expelled from the Party in November of the same year, officially arrested on November 14th, and stood trial in the first instance on September 6th this year.
In the November 2023 disciplinary notification, Zhu Congjiu was accused of “forming cliques, disrupting the political environment, bringing prohibited books into the country for private reading, and resisting organizational review,” as well as being “extremely greedy, relying on finance to benefit from finance.”
Public information shows that the 59-year-old Zhu Congjiu, originally from Feixi, Anhui Province, had worked in the securities regulatory system for over twenty years.
In 2000, Zhu Congjiu served as the General Manager of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, in 2008 as Assistant Chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission and Director of the Issuance Department. In 2012, at the age of 47, Zhu Congjiu became the Deputy Governor of Zhejiang Province, overseeing finance, until his retreat to the second line to the Zhejiang CPPCC in 2022.
Caixin.com had reported that Zhu Congjiu’s career advancement as Zhejiang Deputy Governor was limited due to the immense wealth of his family, leading to the nickname “Zhu Billion.” He was considered a publicly acknowledged “wealthy individual” among officials of the China Securities Regulatory Commission and Zhejiang Province, with reported assets worth billions. Zhu Congjiu’s wife works in the higher-income private equity fund industry.
Industry insiders suggest that Zhu Congjiu’s substantial family wealth is related to his wife’s profession and the areas he was in charge of during his career.