Bank of China (BOC) Vice-Chairman and President Liu Jin resigned without warning on Sunday, only five months after he was reappointed to the position.
The bank enigmatically stated that Liu resigned for “personal reasons” and refused to make any further comments.
Liu is fairly young for a top Chinese executive, having been born in 1967. He still had a few years to go before reaching the male retirement age of 60.
Liu was appointed to the BOC presidency in February 2021 after spending several years as the president of other major state banking institutions. He was also named deputy chief of the Chinese Communist Party for the bank at that time. His resume included being head of investment for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a state-run institution that weighs in as the world’s largest single lender.
When Liu took over, BOC was suffering from a management “talent crunch” because it made some risky crude oil investments, and they did not pay off. Some investors said the ensuing debacle completely wiped out their funds. The secretive Chinese Communist government preferred not to discuss the total amount of the losses, but some industry analysts calculated that the damage to investors was more than one billion dollars.
The crude oil crash-and-burn led to a severe crisis of confidence in BOC, which could only be addressed by drumming top executives out of their offices and replacing them with fresh blood, like Liu.
Liu seemed to be doing well, as he was reappointed to his office in 2024 without much fanfare. The first sign of trouble came in March 2023, when BOC Chairman Liu Liange came under investigation.
Liu Liange stepped down in March and, a month later, pled guilty to accepting more than $17 million in bribes, while he illegally issued almost $500 million in loans. His downfall led to a rash of corruption investigations for officials at numerous Chinese financial institutions, including other BOC executives, as well as Ministry of Finance officials and China’s securities regulators.
Liu mysteriously missed two of BOC’s 13 board meetings in 2023 and was absent from the August 19 meeting. One of the top items on the August meeting agenda was a switch of auditors because BOC’s old auditing firm, PwC China, is under investigation for fraud concerning the collapse of the gigantic China Evergrande property development group.
The board meeting was chaired in Liu’s absence by BOC Chairman and Chinese Communist Party Secretary Ge Haijiao. The bank said on Sunday that Ge will serve as acting president until a permanent replacement for Liu is found.
