A large bundle of money reserved to compensate the victims of China’s poisoned milk powder scandal has been wasted, wrongly spent, or simply gone missing, according to parents.
One of those parents, Zhao Lianhai, says that he and many others never received any compensation money. Further, when he went to the agency that was supposed to dispense the money—the China Dairy Industry Association—on May 26, he was stopped by police and detained for 12 hours. They told him to stop investigating what happened to the money.
What happened, though, is that of the 1.11 billion yuan that was to be paid out to victims of the scandal, 200 million is unaccounted for. The first 910 million was meant for a one-time compensation and initial treatments, while the rest were for ongoing care. Now Zhao and others want to know what happened to it.
The China Life Insurance Company, one of the largest insurers in the world, was meant to handle the compensation fund. Now it is under pressure to explain where the money meant to be used for that find has gone.
The Chinese press has pointed out that the account information of the fund was not sufficiently detailed, neglecting to state, for example, the standards for compensation, and other basic details.
A Beijing lawyer who spoke to the The Epoch Times said the same thing. Where one would expect detailed financial statements, he found only statements in general terms, leaving gaps, and questions.
“This makes us wonder: where did the money go?” asks Zhao Lianhao. “All this must be made public; we must be able to verify it for us to believe them.”
A report on the topic on the popular Internet portal Tencent received numerous comments and complaints from people claiming to be parents of infant victims of the poisoned milk. One parent said that he had only received 2,000 yuan (US$308), and that “the money was oddly distributed; the baby of an official in the village never drank any powdered milk, but still received 2,000 yuan.”
In any case, Zhao Lianhai says that 200 million yuan for ongoing treatment is far from enough. Since the authorities had acknowledged that at least 300,000 babies were afflicted with kidney stones, giving each child only 600 yuan after initial treatment, to last until they are 18 years old, doesn’t even cover a doctor’s examination, he said. Children over four years old were not reimbursed at all.
Zhao, who went from being a regular parent to a hard-bitten activist after his child ingested the chemically tainted milk powder, will start trying to collect funds himself. His quasi-organization, called “Kidney Stone Babies,” plans to start a fundraiser—even though it is illegal in China for NGOs to collect money from the public.
In the past three years he has, under the aegis of his organization, actively contacted business and government offices about making amends over the scandal. He was rejected repeatedly, prosecuted, and at least one point persecuted. Having lost faith in the authorities to solve the parents’ problems, however, he is sticking with the plan to solicit private donations.
Read the original Chinese article.
