The Chinese government will improve the supervision of senior executives in the banking and financial sectors to prevent corruption, a senior official of the Communist Party of China (CPC) said in Beijing on Friday.

"Supervision of senior executives, especially the leadership and key officials, must be tightened so as to prevent power abuse, wrong decision-making and improper conduct," said He Yong, deputy secretary of the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).

During an inspection tour of the People's Bank of China, the central bank, He said penalties for those involved in irregular or illegal operations would be harsher to "increase the cost and risk of corrupt behavior."

"Besides administrative and legal punishment, corrupt staff and officials will be restricted or barred from working in the financial sector," He said.

Corrupt officials would pay heavy fines, He said, adding that money embezzled or stolen should be fully recovered and the bribes confiscated.

The country would also improve repatriation efforts to bring back corrupt officials who had fled abroad with illegal earnings, He said.

A series of scandals have shaken China's finance industry, with high-ranking bankers imprisoned or even executed.

In November 2006, former president of China Construction Bank Zhang Enzhao was sentenced to 15 years in prison for taking bribes totaling 4.2 million yuan (538,000 U.S. dollars).

A month later, the president and an accountant of a branch of the China Construction Bank in northwest China were sentenced to death for embezzling millions of yuan from savings accounts.

Source: Xinhua