Weibo sacks PR director over suspected bribery

Chinese social media platform Weibo has fired a top PR director over bribery allegations. According to media reports, the company said it would not tolerate any fraudulent behaviour and requires everyone to abide by the law.

According to a report from Bloomberg, the employee who was a top PR executive was fired as the company said he failed to "set an example and his abandoning of principles in the face of temptation to profit". It also said that his actions seriously harmed the interests of the company. A Weibo notice seen by Bloomberg also apparently said the action demonstrated Weibo's "zero-tolerance" towards fraudulent behaviour and should be a warning to employees to abide by the law and the group’s rules.

The executive in question has been with the company for over 10 years and according to Reuters, he rose through the ranks through the marketing and PR department. MARKETING-INTERACTIVE has reached out to Weibo for more details of this incident.

Weibo is not the only Chinese company to have made headlines recently due to improper staff behavior. Alibaba  also sacked an employee for sexually assaulting a female employee, and the accused has since confessed to having improper "intimate acts" with her, according to multiple media reports.

A memo written by chairman Daniel Zhang, and reported on South China Morning Post, described the incident as "shameful". Zhang added that the incident was a humiliation for all Alibaba employees, and the incident posed "tremendous sadness for the challenges in Alibaba’s culture". SCMP which is owned by Alibaba, also said that its president and human resources generalist of Alibaba’s Neighbourhood Retail Business also resigned after the incident broke out for not acting in a timely and appropriate manner.

In February this year, a former vice-president at Kuaishou, was also arrested for alleged corruption. 

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