Chinese officials using lottery funds to buy homes, cars and yachts: state media
Yachts, cars and property bought with ticket proceeds as social welfare loses out, finds audit
Many millions of yuan raised each year by China’s lottery ticket sales are either unused or being spent by officials on properties, cars – even yachts – rather than on social welfare projects, state media reported.
Sales of social welfare lottery tickets have raised 1 trillion yuan (about HK$1.2 trillion) since the lottery was launched in 1987; sales of sports lottery tickets, launched 20 years ago, have generated more than 700 billion yuan, reported Xinhua, the state-run news agency.
Last month the National Audit Office launched a surprise month-long audit of the lottery funds across the country after reports that cash had been widely misused.
It found corruption has been rampant inside the civil affairs departments and sports bureaus that running the two respective lottery funds, Xinhua, the state-run news agency said.
An industry insider was quoted as saying that it was common for local governments to let the social welfare fund remain idle.
One Jiangsu financial official said he had never seen the fund being used, even though rules state that it can used to fund social welfare scheme, such as pensions, and medical and unemployment insurance.
In Shandong province, sports departments had still not used 425 million yuan raised from the sports lottery by the end of 2012; in Shanghai, 80 per cent of funds raised by the social welfare lottery had not been used since early 2010.
