Executives at a State-owned enterprise in Guangdong Province are facing accusations of mass nepotism after promoting their relatives to around half of the company's management positions.
Among 45 staff members of a local salt company in Qingyuan, 28 middle executives were found to be relatives or neighbors of other staff, the Southern Weekend recently reported.
Three new executives, promoted on December 20 by the Qingyuan Salt Company (QSC), the town's State-owned salt company, were found to be nephews and the wife of existing top managers.
"It is a typical case of power abuse," Wang Yukai, an anti-corruption expert at Chinese Academy of Governance, told the Global Times Saturday.
The Guangdong Salt Bureau (GSB) killed the promotion at the end of December, according to the report.
Yuan Guichu, a deputy manager of a QSC subsidiary, was reported by the paper as saying that Tan Hongwei, the director of QSC, made use of the illegal "internal retirement policy" to recruit favored em-ployees and dismiss others.
Tan fired a 48-year old male section chief in 2008 under the "internal retirement policy" citing the company's need to downsize, but he soon recruited the wife of a deputy manager to fill the vacancy, an action Tan claimed was "lawful", the report said.
The regulation states that the legal retirement age for ordinary male employees is 60, and 55 for women. Tan recruited his preferred staff in 2003 through informal recruitment to avoid having reporting to higher management.
Wang suggested promulgating detailed recruitment regulations for State-owned enterprises and tightening public supervision over public power misuse, as internal supervision often appears to be in vain.
(By Jin Jianyu)
