Loretta Fredy Bush, the high-profile founder of China’s Xinhua Finance, who was later indicted over an alleged USD50 million fraud, has agreed to a plea deal and appears poised to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to impede the lawful functions of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Shelly Singhal and Dennis Pelino, two former Xinhua Directors who prosecutors say also were involved in the fraud scheme, have agreed to plea deals on the same IRS conspiracy charge. The pleas are expected to be entered in February, the Wall Street Journal reports. The accused were indicted in May 2011 on conspiracy and mail-fraud allegations that they orchestrated a series of undisclosed self-dealing transactions that netted them USD50 million. The conspiracy charge alleges that the three accused obstructed the IRS in efforts to determine whether USD3.5 million owed by Bush and Pelino amounted to forgiven debt and thus was taxable income. Charges of insider trading were dropped. Fredy Bush founded Xinhua Finance in 1999 and built a conglomerate that she touted as “China’s premier financial information and media services company,” bolstered by an arrangement with a subsidiary of China’s government-run Xinhua news agency. She started a Nasdaq-traded U.S. subsidiary, Xinhua Finance Media, and attracted prominent U.S. investors.

China must invest overseas to ensure its food security, said speakers at the recent Asian Financial Forum, including Fan Shenggen, Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute. By 2020, China would need to import 100 million tons of grain each year, Fan said. Last year, it imported 3 million tons of rice, 3 million tons of wheat and 60 million tons of soya beans. China accounted for 60% of the world’s trade in soya beans, said Frank Ning, Chairman of Cofco, China’s largest food conglomerate. It also had a USD27 billion annual food deficit. China overtook the United States as the largest animal feed consumer in the world about 18 months ago, said Ismael Roig, Asia-Pacific President of Archer Daniels Midland, a U.S. food and commodities company. “China is facing exploding protein demand. The biggest shift in Chinese diet has been to protein. That has put enormous pressure on corn and soya beans. The most opportunities are in protein production,” Roig said. China’s rice imports jumped five-fold last year to 2.6 million tons, making it the world’s second largest buyer after Nigeria. While it might import a bit less this year, the country will still tap bumper global supplies to ease record-high domestic prices and top up stockpiles. “Domestic prices are high so there is motivation for trading companies to increase imports,” said an analyst with official think-tank China National Grain and Oils Information Center (CNGOIC). “Bumper rice harvests in most Asian countries will keep global rice prices far below domestic prices.” China’s rice prices rose last year for a third year in a row. China bought around 2 million tons of Vietnamese rice last year, a surge of more than six-fold from around 310,000 tons in 2011. The balance came from Pakistan. China’s rice imports have been in part driven by government stockpiling, the South China Morning Post reports.

Iceland and Switzerland are racing to become the first European countries to ink free trade agreements with China. China and Iceland are making efforts to finalize and sign the FTA in February or March. The talks started in 2005. The two sides still differ on a few minor issues that are not related to the bilateral FTA itself. Bilateral trade rose 21.1% year-on-year in 2012 to USD180 million. Chinese exports rose 24.6% year-on-year to USD95.39 million, and imports increased 17.7% to USD88.96 million. Negotiators from China and Switzerland have already finished the lion’s share of the FTA draft with food and agriculture still being the thorny issues on which an agreement has not been reached. Switzerland is trying to protect the sector, as it is a net importer of agricultural products.

The National Copyright Administration announced on January 17 that the total number of copyright registrations in China last year surpassed 800,000. More than 680,000 were copyrights on works of art, an increase of 49% over 2011. More than half of the registrations were made in Beijing. Copyrights filed for proprietary software reached nearly 140,000, an increase of 27%, with about 2,000 of the software designs related to cloud computing technologies.

Shanghai’s economy expanded 7.5% in 2012 compared to a year earlier but fell short of the city’s target of around 8%. The growth rate slowed from 2011’s 8.2% increase, and was slightly weaker than the nation’s average of 7.8%. However, it was picking up, with 7% expansion in the first quarter of last year, 7.2% in first half and 7.4% in the first three quarters, the Shanghai Statistics Bureau said. The slower expansion rate compared to the national average was mainly due to weakening exports and the city’s faster restructuring, Yan Jun, Chief Economist at the Bureau said. Thanks to the accelerating economic upgrading, the output of Shanghai’s service industry accounted for 60% of its total gross domestic product (GDP) which totaled CNY2.01 trillion last year. The service sector expanded 10.6% year-on-year to CNY1.2 trillion in 2012, contributing 82.7% to last year’s overall growth, led by a surge of 12.6% in the financial industry. The manufacturing sector gained 3.1% to CNY791.3 billion last year, and the agricultural sector edged up 0.5% to CNY12.8 billion. With only 0.06% of China’s land, 1.8% of its population and 1.7% of its investment, Shanghai produced more than 4% of the nation’s overall economic output, Yan said. Its aggregate output surpassed Hong Kong’s in 2009 and Seoul’s in 2011. Last year, Shanghai’s industrial production increased 2.9% on an annual basis to CNY644.6 billion. Automobile manufacturing, one of Shanghai’s six pillar industries, accelerated 7%, and biomedicine added 7.9%. But the production of fine steel and machinery equipment, another two pillar industries, both fell last year due to economic restructuring aimed at reducing high-energy consuming industries. Retail sales in the city rose 9% to CNY738.7 billion in 2012, slower than 2011’s 12.3% jump. The value of e-commerce climbed 75.5%, offering hope of a strong growth point for the future. Fixed-asset investment increased 3.7% to CNY525.4 billion. Shanghai’s trade lost 0.2% to USD436.7 billion last year, with exports slumping 1.4% but imports increasing 1%. The disposable income of urban residents in Shanghai grew 10.9% to CNY40,188 in 2012, the Shanghai Daily reports.