The Chinese government is seeking closer judicial cooperation with more nations to crack down on corrupt officials who flee overseas for shelter, said a procuratorial official on Monday.

"The corrupt officials must face the full force of law wherever they flee," said Tong Jianming, spokesman for the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP), adding that the cooperation would focus on collecting evidence, tracking and extraditing suspects, and returning embezzled funds.

Tong was quoted by China Daily after a US federal jury convicted two former Guangdong bank officials for embezzlement and money laundering. The case is said to be the biggest of its kind since the founding of New China in 1949.

On August 29, a US federal jury in Las Vegas convicted Xu Chaofan and Xu Guojun, the masterminds of the 2001 "Kaiping case", of defrauding the Bank of China of US$485 million over 10 years. Their wives, too, were found guilty of the crime.

The Xus were charged with money laundering, transferring stolen property and passport fraud in the trial that lasted three months. The court will pass the sentence on November 24.

They are the first bank swindlers to face charges in the US, though Washington has repatriated a few corrupt officials.

Tong said Chinese authorities helped the US judicial department collect evidence against the Xus and their wives in China.

Welcoming their conviction, he said "the unprecedented case will serve as a great deterrent" to corrupt officials. "It has sent a clear signal (to corrupt officials) that the US is no longer a safe haven for them," he said.

Besides, on August 22 Canada announced that Deng Xinzhi, chief suspect in a US$2.94-million swindling case, had been repatriated. Deng, a Beijing resident, and his accomplices cheated people out of US$2.94 million in 2002 by impersonating as employees of China Life Insurance Company.

An increasing number of corrupt officials have fled the country after amassing huge amounts of money in recent times, with many of them seeking shelter in the West.

The US-based World Journal newspaper earlier reported that more than 1,000 corrupt Chinese officials had fled to the US, mostly to Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.

China seeks to sign extradition treaties with Western nations, including the US, and has managed to get more than 70 criminals back with the help of other countries since 1998.

Huang Feng, Beijing Normal University's professor of international criminal law, said the conviction of the two corrupt officials and their wives in the US was "a great victory for the Chinese anti-corruption campaign".

"It presents an alternative to extradition," he said. "Fleeing corrupt officials may not be repatriated, but they can still be convicted abroad."

Though China and the US have not signed an extradition treaty, they have intensified their anti-corruption efforts.

(Xinhua News Agency September 9, 2008)