(Ecns.cn)--China's only national Red Cross Society is fighting to maintain the public's trust after a recent scandal in which a 20-year-old girl, who claimed to have a link to the society, bragged online about her luxurious lifestyle. This incident triggered concern that donated money was being misused.
Guo Meimei, who claimed to be the general manager of a company called Red Cross Commerce, which she said handled advertising on Red Cross vehicles, talked about her extravagant lifestyle on her Weibo micro-blog account.
In the pictures uploaded by Guo, she showed off her Maserati and Lamborghini cars, expensive handbags, and a palatial villa.
She has since become the hottest topic on the country's major micro-blog website, weibo.com. The number of "fans" she had on the micro-blog shot up from several hundred to more than 100,000 by last week.
Web users questioned whether Guo had financed her lifestyle out of money that had been donated to the society. Some even said angrily that they would never donate to the society again.
In response, the Red Cross Society posted an announcement on its homepage on June 22, saying there was no such company as Red Cross Commerce under the Red Cross Society of China and noted that the organization did not have an employee named Guo Meimei.
The "V" sign on Guo Meimei's page, meaning that her personal information had been checked and verified by Sina Corp, the operator of Weibo.com, has been removed.
In a statement, Weibo said Guo had previously said in her personal information that she was an actress and, after approval, she changed it to "general manager of Red Cross Commerce."
Weibo apologized to the Red Cross and its users for failing to carefully review Guo Meimei's information and pledged to tighten up the verification process.
However, the announcement failed to calm many web users' anger and "online detectives" continued to dig for evidence and raise questions.
One web user claimed to have connected Guo Meimei to the Red Cross Society of China's vice-president, Guo Changjiang, and alleged that Guo Changjiang had a micro-blog of his own that followed only four other people's micro-blogs. One of the four allegedly belonged to Guo Meimei.
In response, Guo Changjiang said Guo Meimei was not his daughter and later shut down his micro-blog.
In the face of mounting online anger, Guo Meimei wrote on her micro-blog on Wednesday that she had no relationship with the Red Cross Society of China or Guo Changjiang.
"I am an actress and these rumors have hurt me," she wrote. "I and my family members are taxpayers. How can people attack us about how we spend our money?"
The Guo Meimei incident was like a fuse, igniting people's long-standing mistrust and discontent of charity organizations, commented the People's Daily.
The National Audit Office, China's top auditor, told a session of the National People's Congress in Beijing yesterday that the Red Cross Society paid 4.3 million yuan (US$648,488) more than they should have for medical devices in 2010. This was just one of their budget irregularities over the 2009-2010 period.
The auditor also said there were inconsistencies between the Red Cross's final accounting report and its account books.
The Central Government Procurement Center (CGPC) had won a bid worth 12 million yuan to buy medical devices, details of which were not specified, for the Red Cross in December 2009.
However, the Red Cross later signed a contract for more than 16 million yuan with the CGPC, 4.2 million yuan over the bid price.
In another anomaly, at the end of 2009, 253,200 yuan was left unused in the budget of the Red Cross’s stem cell management center in Beijing. But the organization failed to carry over the balance to 2010 and it did not report the money to finance authorities.
The stem cell management center was also found to have listed 224,800 yuan in expenditures on unrelated items without the proper authorization during a project to build a database of donors.
