In July and August of 2010, Tan Mingjie partnered with four friends, including Han and Huang, to open a Japanese restaurant. They verbally agreed that he would invest 40% of the funds. In reality, his total investment was around 1.7 million yuan, accounting for as much as 70% of the investment.
As for buying cars and houses, Tan Mingjie never hesitated. He purchased five properties in total. Apart from the one bought for Yang, the other four were registered under his wife's name. Additionally, he owned four vehicles under his name.
Corruption
After investigation by the court, it was found that between July 2006 and December 2010, Tan Mingjie embezzled over 29 million yuan of public funds.
Starting from 2006, Tan Mingjie increased the monthly allowance he gave to his wife from tens of thousands of yuan to 200,000 yuan. It is estimated that he provided his wife with 4 to 5 million yuan in total.
Tan Mingjie was the cashier at the Shaoguan Intermediate People's Court, earning an annual income of only two or three ten thousand yuan. How could he afford such extravagant spending?
This case was tried elsewhere by the Foshan Intermediate People's Court. Recently, the Foshan Intermediate People's Court sentenced Tan Mingjie to death with reprieve for the crime of embezzlement.
The court determined that the reason for this situation was primarily Tan Mingjie's own caution. Every month, he used fake bank deposit reconciliation statements for the accountant to keep accounts. The bank deposit reconciliation statements were also obtained by him from the bank. After retrieving them, he deleted the amounts he had siphoned off and reprinted a new bank deposit reconciliation statement, balancing the account. Thus, there was no record of cash withdrawals or embezzlement on either the unit's ledger or the fake bank deposit reconciliation statement he created. By April 2010, Tan Mingjie had already balanced the unit's infrastructure account, utility fee deduction account, union account, and judge (police) uniform account. To create the fake reconciliation statements, he even had someone forge seven fake seals.
Yang admitted to neglecting his duties in financial work. He stated that since April 2002 when he started working in finance, the financial seal had always been in his possession. However, after the office renovation in October 2008, when he and Tan Mingjie moved into their new office, their desks were side by side. From that time onward, for convenience, the relevant seals were placed where both could access them, which was in the open drawer on Tan Mingjie's right side. The drawer was usually not locked. Yang only used the seals at the end of the month for bookkeeping purposes. "I trusted him too much. Whenever he said he needed the seal for business, I didn't think twice about giving it to him. Without my personal accountant seal, it would have been difficult for him to withdraw cash or transfer money, making it impossible for him to embezzle public funds."
Another reason was the dereliction of duty by Yang and others in the finance department. Yang himself admitted that according to regulations, he should verify the bank account balances and ensure that the accountant regularly checks the balance with the bank. "But I was always busy and never went to the bank to check. I just reviewed the reconciliation statements given to me by the cashier because I trusted our cashier too much." A single word "busy" allowed more than four years to pass without verifying the accounts with the bank, enabling Tan Mingjie to repeatedly embezzle large sums of money from the Shaoguan Intermediate People's Court.
Incident in Shaoguan
Spending millions on lottery tickets, buying luxurious properties for mistresses, his lavish lifestyle exposed after four years, resulting in a first-instance sentence of death with reprieve.
Lavish gifts to his wife, golden houses for mistresses
PART 2:
According to Tan Mingjie, starting from July 3, 2006, he began withdrawing cash from the administrative account. Under the guise of case handling fees and travel expenses, he wrote the amount and purpose on the bank's cash cheque, stamped it with his own seal and the seal of the unit's accountant Yang, then added the unit's financial seal before going to the bank alone to withdraw cash from the unit's administrative account. Starting from 2009, when the Shaoguan Intermediate People's Court began using official credit cards for reimbursement, he decided to transfer money from the unit's administrative account to the unit's business card, then reimburse the money through the POS machine into his personal official credit card.
The reporter also learned that there was another loophole in the financial system of the Shaoguan Intermediate People's Court. The use of the POS machine for financial reporting required setting three passwords: opening secret password, transfer password, and verification password. Originally, these passwords should be separately managed by the unit's accountant and cashier. However, when the bank installed the financial reporting POS machine at the Shaoguan Intermediate People's Court, it was handled solely by Tan Mingjie. After installation, Yang did not inquire about the passwords, allowing Tan Mingjie to control all three passwords, thus easily transferring money between public and private accounts.
Lottery Betting
Extravagant Spending
Tan Mingjie has been serving as the cashier at the Shaoguan Intermediate People's Court since 2004, responsible for managing the court's bank account, keeping custody of the unit's cash checks and financial seals, and recording the cashier's accounts. Tan Mingjie claimed that during his time as the cashier at the Shaoguan Intermediate People's Court, he was in charge of seven cashier accounts, including the basic account (administrative account), general account (judge and police uniform account), agency union account, infrastructure account, withholding account (withholding water and electricity fees account), litigation fee refund special account, and enforcement bureau inter-account.
Later, he gradually transferred money from the unit's infrastructure account, union account, withholding water and electricity fees account, judge (police) uniform account, and enforcement bureau inter-account to the unit's administrative account, then withdrew cash from the administrative account.
Tan Mingjie's lover believed that his money came from stocks, but that wasn't true. Although Tan Mingjie indeed invested large amounts of money in stocks and funds, he suffered significant losses. He and his wife Zou started purchasing funds around 2007 and stocks around 2008. By 2010, they had invested approximately 4 million yuan in total in stocks and funds, but the stock account's total value had dropped to just over 2 million yuan, shrinking by nearly half.
Lottery wealth dreams drove him to desperate measures
Investment in stocks
Shrank by nearly half
He spent millions on lottery tickets, bought properties and paid for his mistress, owned five properties and four cars, invested over 4 million yuan in stocks, lent huge sums of money to friends without writing IOUs...
Tan Mingjie, born in 1976 in Yingtde, Guangdong Province. How could he possess such a vast amount of money? Was it due to his good luck winning big prizes or because of his shrewd investments? No one expected that his fortune actually came from the accounts of the Shaoguan Intermediate People's Court. Over the four years from July 2006 to December 2010, he exploited the trust placed in him by the finance department and used methods like creating false bank deposit reconciliation statements to take away over 29 million yuan from the Shaoguan Intermediate People's Court's accounts. If he hadn't fled with the money later, his criminal acts might have remained undiscovered.
Why weren't the missing millions discovered for four years?
From July 2006 to December 2010, spanning 4 years and 5 months, over 29 million yuan vanished from the Shaoguan Intermediate People's Court's accounts without anyone noticing. Had Tan Mingjie not succumbed to the temptation to abscond with the funds, no one would have known when this massive hole would be discovered.
Around June 2010, Tan Mingjie even voluntarily offered to help Yang buy a house. After selecting a property in a neighborhood in Shaoguan, he paid a 30,000 yuan deposit and then paid the remaining 630,000 yuan in full. Later, finding it difficult to park by the roadside, he decided to spend 136,000 yuan on a parking space.
After becoming "rich," Tan Mingjie also began keeping a mistress, Yang, whom he met through a friend. Tan Mingjie gave Yang about 5,000 yuan per month for household expenses, which was more than double his monthly salary. In 2010, on Yang's birthday, to please her, Tan Mingjie bought her an Ebel watch for over 9,000 yuan. Besides, Tan Mingjie often bought her expensive items like mobile phones and gold jewelry. For Yang's convenience, Tan Mingjie even bought her an electric scooter and later boldly handed her 100,000 yuan to invest in stocks.
Article written by journalist Liu Yiming
PART 3: Doubts
Buying lottery tickets brought him some success for a while, but after several consecutive wins, especially the big prize of over 100,000 yuan, he became addicted to gambling and couldn't stop. He invested more and more, losing the 100,000 yuan he won and accumulating debts of hundreds of thousands of yuan that he couldn't repay. This led him to consider embezzling money from the Shaoguan Intermediate People's Court, hoping to win a big prize to pay back the money, but the amount he embezzled grew larger and larger.
Wasteful Spending
Court Cashier
PART 1: "Sudden Wealth"
Logically, every check or draft involved in the case should have been carefully reviewed by the accountant Yang and stamped with his personal seal before being used. So why could Tan Mingjie obtain Yang's accountant seal and misuse it for such a long time?
Tan Mingjie's annual income at the Shaoguan Intermediate People's Court was about 20,000 to 30,000 yuan. Where did the money he spent so lavishly come from? On December 17, 2010, the day after he fled with the money and was caught, the truth finally came to light.