 RBS is not the first foreign bank to enter China's market |
Liu Jinbao is a name that is probably unfamiliar to most Royal Bank of Scotland shareholders.
Following the UK group's announcement that it will lead a �3.1bn (�1.7bn) investment in Bank of China, they would be wise to familiarise themselves with this Chinese banker's career details.
Mr Liu was president of the Hong Kong branch of Bank of China until he was caught making some unauthorised withdrawals.
Last week he was found guilty of embezzling almost $1m of the bank's money.
China's People's Court in Changchun, Jilin province, sentenced him to death for corruption, although the sentence has been suspended for two years.
It means Mr Liu's life will likely be spared, although he will spend the rest of his life in jail.
China risks
The bad news for RBS shareholders is that inside jobs of this kind are not rare in Chinese banking.
Earlier this week, another Bank of China manager confessed to a court that he had stolen over $150m. It was one in a long line of cases that have captured the attention of China's state media.
Investing in China comes with big risks.
For a start, the government is not even sure how many banks there are in the country.
The big four state banks are believed to have around 80,000 branches across China, but counting the smaller regional banks is almost impossible.
The further the branch is from headquarters, the more difficult it is to control. At some local levels managers show greater loyalty to Communist party officials than they do to their bosses in Beijing.
Debt worries
For a long time China's banks were seen as little more than an extension of Beijing's economic policy.
Sitting down and getting a loan was easy - all you needed to have were the right connections. Banks lent freely, and they lent badly.
But in the past few years the banks have been disposing of those bad loans.
 China is keen to encourage more foreign investors into its market |
"China's bad bank debts were about 25% of all the loans issued by the state banks ten years ago," said Professor Xiaju Zhao, of the Shanghai International Banking and Finance Institute.
"By the second half of this year the figure had gone down to 10%. So they've made a lot of progress in improving the situation here."
RBS will bring much needed expertise to China.
The country's middle-class population is expanding fast and could reach 100 million in the next ten years, according to some estimates.
Most of those people are without credit cards or mortgages, and the cross-selling of financial products has been a successful growth area for RBS in Britain.
Securing a seat on Bank of China's board will also go some way to easing investor worries.
World class
China's banking sector will be fully open to foreign firms next year, following a World Trade Organization deal.
RBS is not the first foreign investor to take a stake in one of China's biggest banks.
In June, Bank of America invested $3bn in China Construction Bank, while UK-based giant HSBC paid $1.75bn last year for a 19.9% stake in Bank of Communications, China's fifth-biggest lender.
China's government is keen that others follow. Beijing understands that if China is to have a world class economy, it also needs a world class banking system.
Foreign shareholders will have to hope it does not cost them too much in the process.
One-Minute World News 
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China's bad bank debts were about 25% of all the loans issued by the state banks ten years ago - by the second half of this year the figure had gone down to 10%
