If accountants think the regulators here are tough, spare a thought for Liu Yibing who has been sentenced to death in China for running a scam.

Actually, it's all part of China's crackdown on the rampant corruption with the recent appointment of anti-graft supremos in Beijing, Shanghai and the port city of Tianjin and promises to clean out corruption and clean things up ahead of the 2008 Olympics.

That's after reports of China's Communist Party expelling the fired vice mayor of Beijing who oversaw Olympic construction projects and handing him over to prosecutors on bribery and other charges. The charges involved him allegedly stealing the equivalent of millions of dollars in bribes, slinging some of the money to his mistress along the way.

Just how successful this will be remains to be seen. For a start, corruption in China is endemic in a system that has created a new class of oligarchs (pretty similar to what occurred in the former Soviet Union when Communism collapsed).

And as MercatorNet points out, Chinese laws are hopeless when it comes to prosecuting multinationals and 60 per cent of the prosecuted 500,000 cases of bribery and corruption in China over the the past decade involved international trade and foreign businessmen. And foreign companies don't exactly have the high moral ground here.