It's not a bribe, it's a business card

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Hong Kong also seems to be a popular place for Chinese bureaucrats to store their ill-gotten wealth. In fact, one of the new trends we’ve seen and heard about from business colleagues in Asia is how mainland officials are now receiving bribes in the form of solid gold business cards.

Imagine you’re a businessman in Xian who needs some silly permit, and you have to grease a local bureaucrat. It would be untoward to deliver a suitcase full of cash… especially these days with all the internal scrutiny from the Bo Xilai incident.

So now what business people seem to be doing is minting solid gold business cards. When they want to bribe an official, they schedule a meeting, and hand them a business card or six. It’s so innocuous, nobody really notices.

For the bureaucrat, it’s much simpler to travel with a few ‘gold cards’ than cash. And Hong Kong is an easy place to store a collection of such cards… or even melt them down into other forms.
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