The number of financial crimes involving trading with undisclosed information increased substantially in 2014, up from seven suspects in three cases in 2013 to 31 suspects in 24 cases in 2014, an official with the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) said on Wednesday.
"Crimes of insider trading, trading with information undisclosed to the public, as well as manipulating securities and futures, have gained wide public attention in this year's stock market turmoil," Nie Jianhua, SPP vice director in charge of public prosecution, told a press conference on financial crimes on Wednesday.
The Chinese procuratorial organs have strengthened supervision for increased prosecution. In December 2014, the SPP lodged a protest against the verdict in a March 2014 case involving insider trading in which the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court sentenced a former fund manager to three years in prison with five years probation. The ruling was initially protested by the Shenzhen People's Procuratorate and later by the SPP on the grounds of "inappropriate penalty."
China adopted a "double penalty system" to combat such crimes, which means that individuals will be punished with both imprisonment and fines, Nie said.
Anyone convicted of leaking confidential information and insider trading faces sentences of up to five years in prison and will be fined up to five times the amount of illegal gains, according to China's Criminal Law.
The number of financial crime cases in general is also on the rise. The SPP dealt with 12,883 cases in 2014, up almost 60 percent from 2013. Credit card fraud cases top the financial crime list in terms of quantity.
Chinese prosecutors investigated 877 people in the financial sector for bribery or abuse of power between January 2014 and June 2015, spokesperson Xiao Wei said during the press briefing.
Xiao said that nearly 75 percent of them worked in banks, and the rest were mainly from insurance companies and securities agencies. More than half of the 877 were suspected of taking or giving bribes.
Thirty people were investigated in cases involving at least 30 million yuan ($4.7 million), the aggregated value of which amounted to 2 billion yuan.
The SPP promised to strengthen management of stock brokerages and crack down on insider trading and manipulation of securities and futures markets.
