AN audit of last year’s Central Government budget has exposed a litany of problems, from bad loans being covered up to money diverted from poverty alleviation programs and meetings in luxury hotels, the auditor said yesterday.

    The National Audit Office gave examples of issues it had discovered, but it did not give the total sum of misspent funds.

    About 1,100 people were found to have been involved in criminal behavior, it said, however.

    Thirty-eight Central Government departments and 389 bodies under them were audited, amounting to 154 billion yuan (US$24.2 billion) of spending, or a third of the 2013 budget.

    Although spending on meetings, travel and official transport dropped 23 percent from the previous year following a high-profile campaign to tackle graft and waste, not everyone got the message, the auditor said.

    The Transport Ministry was singled out for holding 43 meetings last year at five-star hotels, while a geological research institute team spent three days in U.S. gambling hub Las Vegas while supposedly on a scientific trip.

    In the financial sector, the auditor said three financial bodies had incorrectly issued loans or covered up bad loans worth 18.3 billion yuan. It did not name the bodies.

    Eight State-owned banks, including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, were found to have lent 375 billion yuan to companies barred from gaining such loans.

    Dalian Shide Group Co. and Ruiyang (Dalian) Investment Management Ltd. were singled out for using 268 million yuan in subsidies assigned for overseas mergers and acquisitions of technology enterprises to buy 14 wine estates in France.

    In Jianyang City of Sichuan Province, 1.42 billion yuan allocated for public welfare spending was misappropriated between 2010 and 2013.

    (SD-Agencies)