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    Half Tones

    Beijing Imprisons Accountant Buying Beauty on State’s Dime

    May 13, 2019

    A Beijing court has sentenced a government employee to eight years in prison for embezzling over 12 million yuan ($1.75 million) from state coffers to spend on beauty services and other expenses, financial news outlet Caixin reported Saturday.

    Zhang Honghong, formerly an accountant at China’s Ministry of Natural Resources, was sentenced on March 20 for misappropriating public funds between 2001 and 2017 — half of which was spent on beauty services, including plastic surgeries, according to the report. A judicial document from April shows that Zhang had confessed to her supervisor about embezzling “part of the work unit’s money” by falsifying some expenses in the ministry’s bookkeeping while omitting others.

    The court also ordered Zhang — who had already paid back 9.6 million yuan to her work unit by May 2018 — to return the remaining 2.5 million yuan and issued her an additional fine of 700,000 yuan, according to the judicial document.

    Government workers in China have been caught satisfying their vanity at the state’s expense before. In 2012, a Beijing procuratorate found 12 officials guilty of using public funds to pay for various beauty services, according to Xinhua News Agency. (Image: VCG)