China's Tencent, one of the country's leading technology companies, has announced the layoffs of more than a hundred employees who violated company policy. It turned out that the materials on some of the dismissed were turned over to the police, and they were later admitted to bribery and embezzlement, and at least one received a prison sentence.

The company is one of the leading game developers in the world, and also, for example, owns the Chinese super app WeChat, which is used by the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire everywhere. At the same time, at the end of 2020, Tencent, along with other Chinese IT giants, fell under antitrust sanctions and suffered serious damage. In a recent statement, the company, which recently reported a second consecutive quarter of revenue decline, said it had found more than 100 employees guilty of violating anti-fraud policies. At the same time, the matter was not limited to layoffs - these 10 people were transferred to local law enforcement agencies.

The company said that in response to corruption and fraud cases in the company, the corporate security division dealing with such matters increased the intensity of investigations. As it turned out, the number of investigations in 2022 increased compared to 2021.

Cases of embezzlement of the company's funds and bribery were revealed, some of the materials were handed over to law enforcement agencies, the cases ended in convictions. The “purges” affected both the division responsible for content and other areas of activity, including cloud services and the fintech industry. Moreover, one of the employees was sentenced to three years in prison for accepting bribes from people working for other companies.

The head of Pony Ma said at an internal meeting last month that the level of corruption at the company was "shocking." However, according to the SCMP portal, a decision was made to break off cooperation with companies whose representatives gave bribes to Tencent employees, it has already been decided to stop cooperation with 23 companies.

At one time, the company was seriously affected by the actions of Chinese regulators, who forced them to edit games, for example, by removing entire fragments from them with “politically harmful” content. In addition, the developers were forced to take the necessary measures to restrict access to games by minors in accordance with the Chinese rules adopted at the time. However, the economic situation of the company began to gradually recover. Compared to the low recorded on October 28, 2022, the value of its shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange has almost doubled. In addition, last month the company received its first video game license in 18 months, symbolizing Tencent's return to normal operations.