Corrupt ByteDance Catering Executive Gets His Just Deserts

A former ByteDance executive was sentenced to six years in prison for accepting more than 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) in kickbacks from two of the companies he worked with during his tenure as head of catering at the online media and entertainment giant.

Gao Chuanfeng received the sentence from an appeals court in Beijing, according to a recently released verdict. A lower court had originally sentenced Gao to seven years in its verdict announced at the end of last year. But the appeals court reduced that by a year due to his cooperation in the case and his family’s return of the remainder of his ill-gotten gains after the original trial.

Gao, who will turn 40 this year, is a native of Jiangsu province capital Nanjing who started at ByteDance in 2017 in charge of its catering operations. He began taking kickbacks just two months after joining the company.

Such internal corruption is relatively common in both state-owned and private Chinese companies, with employees using their positions for personal gain by demanding money from business partners for preferential treatment. The administration of President Xi Jinping has been trying to stamp out such corruption in government and at big state-owned enterprises for much of the last decade. But private companies like ByteDance have been left to tackle the problem themselves.

In his testimony, Gao confirmed he had accepted kickbacks from two parties he worked with, ranging anywhere from 50,000 yuan to 300,000 yuan per month from each, based on how much business they received from ByteDance during that time.

ByteDance opened an internal investigation into the matter in 2019 after being tipped off by a whistleblower.

Contact reporter Yang Ge (geyang@caixin.com) and editor Joshua Dummer (joshuadummer@caixin.com)

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