BEIJING -- China dismissed 243 senior managers in 1,085 cases of law-breaking, such as graft, embezzlement and malpractice, in banking institutions last year, said the banking watchdog here Saturday.

The total number of cases dropped 189 from 2005, while the number of those each involving a million yuan (US$125,000) or more decreased by 56 to 273, said Liu Mingkang, president of the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), at an annual work conference here Saturday.

Liu has said the decline of cases was "a good situation" and a hard-earned achievement.

The CBRC probed 69,200 banking institutions last year and punished 1,104 for illegal operations as well as 7,407 people who were responsible for them, said Liu.

He has urged the CBRC to supervise banks more efficiently, dig deep into the roots for frequent happening of illegal cases and improve the responsibility system.

Last November, the former president of China Construction Bank, Zhang Enzhao, was sentenced to a 15-year jail term for taking more than four million yuan in bribes.

In December, the president and an accountant of a CCB branch in northwest China's Shaanxi Province were sentenced to death for embezzling more than 200 million yuan from September 1997 to October 2000 from savings accounts.