In a rapidly developing story, high-ranking executives at WPP’s GroupM have been detained following a series of raids by the Shanghai Economic Investigations Department (ECID).

Yao Lan, Group M China’s ex-head of Data Centre, Rycan Di, chief investment officer for China and Diana Hong, ex-general manager for Group M China have all been detained by the ECID on bribery charges.

The agency’s China’s CEO and country managing director Patrick Xu was also understood to have been questioned in the raids on Friday (20th October), but has apparently not been charged at this stage.

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The news follows a report by Campaign Asia-Pacific which claims that the charges may correlate to possible media broker activities, specifically relating to how rebates are distributed to agencies and their employees.

An ECID statement put out on Chinese social media site Weibo claims that working in partnership with the Marketing Supervision Department, it uncovered a bribery case involving a senior executive at an advertising company, who has since been detained.

According to the statment, these raids are the result of a long-running investigation which took place from 2019 to February this year. It also claims that Di, Yao and Hong have been detained for ‘taking advantage of their positions and facilitating large bribes’ whilst working for the advertising firm.