Tencent Fires Hundreds Of Employees Over Corruption

On January 16th, the WeChat public account “Sunshine Tencent” of Tencent Group’s anti-fraud investigation department issued a notice stating that throughout 2022, the department discovered and investigated more than 70 cases of violations of the “Tencent high-voltage line”, involving the company’s PCG, Cloud computing and fintech business. More than 100 people were dismissed because of this, and more than 10 people were suspected of committing crimes and were transferred to the public security organization, the group’s PCG unit oversees Tencent’s vast content output, including news, sports and movies.

In this department alone, several employees were convicted by the court of accepting bribes by non-state employees and sentenced to several months to three years in prison. According to reports, since 2005, Tencent has put forward the concept of “Tencent high-voltage line”, which regards fraud, accepting bribes, leaking secrets, unfair competition and other viola-tions as “high-voltage line”, and stipulates that once an individual employee touches this line, he will be fired and permanently Not hired.

If the relevant laws and regulations are violated and the standards for filing a case are met, Tencent will transfer it to the public security department for handling according to law. If external individuals or companies participate in the behavior of Tencent employees violating the “Tencent High Line”, Tencent will immediately stop cooperation and put them on the blacklist. In the notification on January 16th, a list of new entities that Ten-cent will never cooperate with in 2022 was announced at the same time.

It is also reported that on December 15th last year, Tencent Group CEO Ma Huateng stated at an internal employee meeting that the corruption problem within Tencent was “shocking” and had already affected the development of many businesses.