Hong Kong’s anti-corruption agency has arrested 22 individuals, including 18 bank employees who allegedly accepted HK$2 million (US$257,372) in bribes from an intermediary to defraud the institutions of referral fees in mortgage loan applications.
The 13 men and nine women, aged between 31 and 56, were arrested in raids at more than 30 locations earlier this month.
Aside from the 18 frontline staff of 10 local banks, the remaining four people were spouses of the workers and an associate.
The suspects faced allegations of accepting or offering bribes, money laundering and conspiracy to defraud, according to Grace Yee Hin-lai, principal investigator of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC).
To apply for a property mortgage loan, applicants would either go directly through a bank or via a referral intermediary. The ICAC’s chief investigator, Murphy Chan Tak-fai, said the bank was required to pay a referral fee to the intermediary in the latter case.
Chan added that the arrested bank employees had allegedly colluded with an intermediary to include referral application forms in documents prepared for mortgage loan applicants for their signing, in which some were discovered to contain suspected forged signatures.
“The intermediary had allegedly offered HK$2 million in bribes to frontline bank employees to mislead 10 banks in more than 200 property mortgage loan applications. ICAC investigations revealed that the applicants had no knowledge of the mortgage referrals,” the anti-corruption agency said.
