DaVinci scandal grows as newspaper exec sacked
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Shanghai Daily, January 7, 2012
Cui Bin, general manager of the Beijing Times newspaper, was sacked yesterday on suspicion he dealt with DaVinci Furniture in a 3 million yuan (US$475,150) business to offer public relations services to help the company try to evade its scandals.
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Cui Bin |
Mediach.com, a website registered by Cui, was also shut down on Wednesday after it was exposed by media to have signed the contract with Shanghai-based DaVinci Furniture Ltd for PR services.
According to the news website Caixin.com, the furniture seller asked Cui for help last July 10, after a program on China Central Television showed that the company's products claimed to be imported from Italy were actually made in China.
The program said products sold by DaVinci were sent to Italy or just to Shanghai ports and then back so they could qualify for import certificates. The program put DaVinci in the center of a national scandal.Caixin.com said Huang Zhixin, director of DaVinci, signed a 3 million yuan deal with Cui on July 14, hiring him and his website to perform a series of PR services.
They included "deeply communicating with China's major media" to help DaVinci "get rid of media supervisions?" and "erase all the negative effects from the incident," according to Caixin.com.
A photocopy of the contract published on Caixin.com showed that it required Cui's website to "communicate" with key officials of CCTV's advertising department, to invite officials of CCTV and other major media to interview with DaVinci to clear it from scandals, and deal with the massive reports blanketing the Internet.
Cui's website, Mediach.com, allegedly collected 2.4 million yuan in fees from DaVinci, while the company has refused to pay the remaining 600,000 yuan for unknown reasons, said Caixin.com.
In the latest wave of the continuing scandal, DaVinci claimed that it paid about 1 million yuan to a CCTV reporter to entice him to stop negative reporting about the company, The Beijing News reported at the end of December.
Cui asked the company to deliver the 1 million yuan to his bank account in Hong Kong and he then paid the money to CCTV reporter Li Wenxue last July, the report said. Li later denied online that he took the money.
Cui, 37, became general manager of the Beijing Times at the beginning of 2010.
DaVinci was fined 1.33 million yuan over quality, labeling and advertising issues by the Shanghai Industrial and Commercial Administrative Bureau on September 23.
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