The ICAC on Tuesday said 22 people have been arrested on suspicion of accepting bribes and helping intermediaries defraud banks of mortgage referral fees.

The case involved over 200 mortgage applications and more than HK$2 million in bribes.

Those arrested, aged between 31 and 58, include 18 frontline staff from 10 local banks.

In one of the cases, a married couple who worked at banks allegedly received HK$600,000 in bribes.

Grace Yee, a principal investigator with the Independent Commission Against Corruption, explained how the fraud scheme worked.

"During the investigation, the ICAC found that frontline bank staff had accepted bribes from intermediaries by secretly slipping referral forms into the mortgage loan documents that borrowers needed to sign," she said.

"This made it appear as if customers who were directly applying for mortgage loans had come through intermediary referrals, allowing the intermediaries to fraudulently obtain referral fees from the banks."

However, Yee said she believes the case only involves a few bad apples at individual banks and that Hong Kong's banking sector as a whole remains clean.