Ore giant workers admit taking Chinese bribes
Four staff from mining giant Rio Tinto pleaded guilty today to taking bribes in a case seen as part of a harsh new attitude toward foreign business in China.
Rio Tinto is one of China's top providers of iron ore and a key industry negotiator in commodity price talks with the government.
The staff include a Rio Tinto executive who was arrested along with three workers last year during fractious annual negotiations over iron ore prices.
The admissions of bribe taking - although no details of the allegations have been released - are a blow for Rio Tinto when it is striving to restore good relations with China. The four also face charges of stealing commercial secrets, and final verdicts in the trial could take weeks.
"Only in the last year have we come upon some difficulties, which we are working hard to resolve," Rio Tinto's chief executive, Tom Albanese, said today.
Stern Hu, an Australian national, was Rio Tinto's top executive in charge of iron ore for China when he was arrested. Lawyers said Hu and the three Chinese nationals - Liu Caikui, Ge Minqiang and Wang Yong - pleaded guilty but disputed the amounts they are alleged to have accepted.
"During the course of the trial, Mr Hu made some admissions concerning those two bribery amounts. So he did acknowledge the truth of some of those bribery amounts," the Australian consul-general in Shanghai, Tom Connor, said after the first day of the trial finished.
Mr Connor said Hu was accused of taking 6.5bn Yuan (€700,000) in bribes.
Rio Tinto, based in Melbourne and London, at first rigorously denied the charges against its employees, but its recent statements have only urged that the court handle the case in a quick and transparent way.
The company recently named a new top executive for China, and last week announced an agreement with China's state-run aluminium giant Chinalco to develop an iron ore reserve in the West African country of Guinea.
"Today China is our largest customer," Mr Albanese said. "Today, I want to look to the future."
The case comes as many foreign businesses appear to be reassessing the environment in the world's fastest growing major market.
The American Chamber of Commerce released a report Monday showing a growing number of foreign businesses in China - 38% of those surveyed - feel shut out under new government policies promoting homegrown technology.
The Chinese government meanwhile intensified its rhetoric against Google after the company said it was on the verge of making good on a threat to close its China site, Google.cn, because Beijing forces the it to censor search results.
"Business is business. But when it involves political tricks, business will come to an end soon," the newspaper China Daily wrote in one of several commentaries in state media today that accused Google of harbouring a political agenda.
The four Rio Tinto employees have not been allowed any public comment since their arrest. China has not disclosed who might be accused of offering the alleged bribes.
Reports have suggested that they may have been caught up in an effort to control information exchanged during the iron ore pricing talks, where Rio Tinto was acting as lead negotiator for the miners.
