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Alibaba Confirms Some Taobao Staff Arrested For Accepting Bribes in ‘Recent Past’

Alibaba Group issued a statement this evening confirming reports that have been swirling for some time now, that a number of Taobao workers had in the past accepted bribes from e-commerce vendors.

According to a report this evening by Bloomberg, Taobao has closed nine online stores from those vendors, and police have made some arrests. While this news has been making fresh headlines of late, our own inquiries with the company this evening indicate that the incidents go a little ways back. An Alibaba Group spokesperson elaborates: This issues raised are actually old news. The document posted on Taobao forum references [1] some isolated instances involving a handful of employee misbehavior that have largely been announced in Chinese media in the recent past.

When we further inquired about when the arrests were made, we were pointed towards an article about an arrest made back in April of 2011 (with sentencing in November 2011).

Of course, it goes without saying that the misguided actions of a few employees are not the norm, and Taobao has emphatically stated its opposition to it. Speaking of the recent past, the website has came under fire back in January when it was again listed on the USTR’s “notorious markets” list, despite its own protestations, as well as those of China’s Ministry of Commerce. Taobao has cleaned up its act in many ways as far piracy and counterfeit goods [2] — and like other big internet players like Baidu, Youku, etc, should be commended for their efforts regarding intellectual property issues — although here at TechInAsia we still sometimes find some questionable products on the website. Some of us might have even bought some. 1. The document mentioned here is Alibaba Group’s statement in Chinese on Taobao forums, available here.

2. For example, it banned the posting of optical discs with audio-visual content last summer, much to the delight of the MPAA.