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Tencent"s headquarters in Shenzhen, China

BEIJING, January 16 (TMTPOST) — Tencent (TCEHY) fired over 100 people in more than 70  bribery or embezzlement cases and transferred more than 10 of them to the public security organs for suspected crimes in 2022, according to its anti-fraud results released on Monday.

The internal corruption became more rampant in 2022 than in 2021, when around 70 employees were sacked in over 50 cases.

Ma Huateng, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Tencent, said at an internal staff meeting last December that the serious corruption within Tencent directly affects its business progress.

The company also disclosed 18 cases in 2022 that were investigated, transferred to justice, and judged by courts due to suspected bribery or embezzlement. Ten of them came from the Platform & Content Group, involvingalmost its every business line, including Information Operations Department, Tencent News, NBA Business, Content Production Department and Short Video Community Product Department. Employees affected were dismissed and would never be hired by Tencent again. Some of them were suspected of committing a crime.

Zhang Meng, the former series producer of Tencent Video, was sentenced to three years in prison for the crime of accepting bribes by a non-state functionary. The production cost of a film or a television drama ranges from tens of millions of yuan to hundreds of millions of yuan. When platforms have a bigger say in the production, bribery becomes almost inevitable.

“On the one hand, as there are many projects on the market every year, it is for sure that some will get phased out. And such results are affected by the relationship between production companies and the platforms. On the other hand, when the platform companies fight corruption harder, they turn to a safer approach to speak with data. However, that would cost the ability to innovate, because everyone tends to copy the cases that were a proven success. Thus, a rigid mechanism came into being,” a manager of another video-streaming platform said.