Fake fraud-f ighting unit busted Ex-friend names and shames elephant killer

THE fake interrogation room looked so authentic that the gang’s plan appeared foolproof.

With countless officials having been arrested for corruption by Chinese authorities, four con artists from the northeast Heilongjiang province spent time and money crafting a replica of a state prosecutor’s office inside an abandoned shopping mall.

Then they kidnapped what they hoped would be the first of their many victims – until they were caught out in a police sting.

Chinese criminals pretending to be anti-corruption officials have often targeted rich people in recent years. Since genuine investigators routinely abuse Chinese laws – providing no identification and information to relatives, and detaining people beyond legal limits – citizens can be easily fooled.

But few have gone to the trouble of the four fake prosecutors, whose own bust by police emerged this week.

The plot came together in May as the four agreed over dinner that officials most feared being investigated for their part in China’s endemic corruption. Over three months, they spent NZ$46,000 building an imitation interrogation room, complete with official-looking symbols, signs, certificates, computers, video cameras and handcuffs.

One gang member targeted his neighbour, the wealthy head of a state-owned farm. The gang pounced in late August, bursting into his home as he was watching television with his wife, who made a quick call to the police.

Taken with hoods over their heads to the interrogation site, the couple spent the night denying charges of corruption but agreed ‘‘for personal safety’’ to pay NZ$92,000. When they were allowed to return home to collect the cash, they found police waiting.

Police later arrested three of the gang on extortion charges. One remains at large. The reports gave no indication that their victim was corrupt but many Chinese online commenters quickly assumed his guilt.

‘‘Producing [so much money] so easily shows that this official is indeed a corrupt one,’’ someone wrote on the Tencent news site.

China’s anti-corruption crackdown, the signature campaign of President Xi Jinping has sparked a profitable line in bogus fraud-busting.

Xi has vowed to pursue both ‘‘tigers’’ and ‘‘flies’’ to reduce corruption which is so widespread that he and other Communist Party leaders have termed the anti-fraud and bribery fight a ‘‘life and death’’ struggle for the party.

In the process, Xi has also jailed possible rivals, including former security chief Zhou Yongkang.

The anti-corruption campaign has curbed ostentatious consumption by officials and has proved popular among the public, but still relies on internal supervision by the party rather than independent oversight. A LEADING animal rights group has named the man believed to be the German hunter who paid nearly NZ$92,000 to shoot one of the largest elephants ever seen in Zimbabwe.

Rainer Schorr, a property mogul from Berlin, was named by three separate sources after Germany’s branch of animal rights organisation Peta offered a €1000 reward to anyone who could identify the hunter.

The hunter was photographed posing with the dead elephant, believed to be the biggest elephant killed in Africa in almost 30 years.

In a case that echoes the furore that erupted after Cecil the lion was shot by an American dentist, 55-year-old Schorr, a father of one, paid US$60,000 for a permit to hunt a bull elephant.

A former friend of the businessman told The Daily Telegraph that he recognised the hunter as Schorr, the founder and chief executive of a private equity and asset management company.

The man, who ended his eight-year friendship with Schorr more than a year ago over a business disagreement, said he was told several weeks ago that the businessman was on a hunting trip in Zimbabwe.

He said hunting was Schorr’s ‘‘big passion’’, and he partly owned a farm of around 13,000 acres in Namibia, where he indulged in his pursuit.

When approached by the Telegraph, Schorr said: ‘‘I don’t know what you are talking about. You have the wrong person.’’

He claimed he was at a trade fair in Munich at the time of the hunt, thought to be the Expo Real event. However, Schorr’s name does not appear in the published list of participants at the fair.