Ex-State official gets life in prison

Su Rong, a former State official who had also served as Party chief in Jiangxi, Qinghai and Gansu provinces, has been sentenced to life in prison for corruption.

The Intermediate People's Court in Jinan, capital of Shandong province, sentenced Su on Monday.

Su said he would not appeal. He had been one of the 23 vice-chairmen of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference until disciplinary authorities began investigating him in June 2014.

He was found guilty of taking bribes, abusing public power and possessing a huge amount of unexplained assets, said the court.

According to the verdict, Su took 116 million yuan ($16.9 million) in bribes and failed to explain an additional income of 80 million yuan.

Also on Monday, two former officials who had been hiding overseas for years to avoid trial were sentenced for corruption.

Wang Guoqiang, who voluntarily returned to China in December 2014 after more than two years on the run, was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Li Huabo, who came back to China in May 2015 after about four years in Singapore, was sentenced to life in prison.

Huang Feng, head of the Institute for International Criminal Law at Beijing Normal University, said the courts showed leniency in the two cases, taking into consideration that the two returned to China of their own will.

Li returned after serving two years in jail in Singapore and turned himself in to police.

Wang was found guilty of bribery and having a large amount of unexplained income. The Intermediate People's Court in Shenyang, Liaoning province, said Wang took bribes of nearly 9.6 million yuan when he held top positions in Fengcheng, Liaoning province. In addition, he failed to give a reasonable account of the sources for an additional 5.4 million yuan.

Wang was the first to return to China of his own will after the anti-graft authority, as well as a number of central government departments, launched operations in 2014 to net corrupt officials who fled to other countries to avoid punishment.

The Intermediate People's Court in Shangrao, Jiangxi province, found that Li misused his powers at the finance bureau in Poyang to embezzle 94 million yuan, along with former co-workers, from the local government's infrastructure fund between 2006 and 2010.

Since 2014, Skynet operations launched by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the country's top anti-graft authority, have brought back 2,442 suspects in economic crimes, including 397 corrupt government officials, from overseas. In that same time, China recovered 8.5 billion yuan in assets connected to the cases, according to CCDI data.

zhang_yi@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 01/24/2017 page3)