Beijing -- China has so far punished a total of 416 civil servants amid a
national move against commercial bribery which began in the middle of last year,
said a senior official with the leading group on anti-commercial bribery under
the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) here Monday.
Among the officials, 49 are city-level and 367 county-level ones, said Li
Yufu, deputy director of the leading group, at a news conference which is CPC's
first ever to tell the public information on its latest fruits of combating
commercial bribery.
He said 1,603 cases were related to state workers, taking up to 23 percent of
the total, with 508 million yuan (US$63.5 million) of illicit money involved.
In comparison, Li said, China tackled 6,972 commercial bribery cases during
the period, involving 1.963 billion yuan (about US$245 million).
The cases mainly existed in fields of construction, land acquisition,
ownership transfer of state-owned enterprises, government procurement, medicine
purchasing and selling, resources development, bank lending, trade in securities
and futures, commercial insurance, publishing industry, telecommunication
industry, electric power industry, sports industry and environmental protection.
Statistics from the office of the leading group show that as the easy area of
commercial bribery, the fields witnessed 5,480 cases or 78.6 percent of the
country's total in the period.
The amounts of the commercial briberies taken in the fifteen key cases
unveiled in the conference ranged from 560,000 to 10.73 million yuan (US$70,000
to 1.34 million ) and 15 were sentenced more than 10 years in jail.
Wen Mengjie, former head of the technology division under the Beijing branch
of the Agricultural Bank of China, raked 10.73 million yuan (about 1.34 million
U.S. dollars) from equipment and software providers and illicitly seized 4.32
million yuan (US$540,000) of public money.
He was sentenced to death in July, 2006, and the ruling is now undergoing a
routine review at the Supreme Court.
Zhang Quan, former deputy director of the Department of Communications of
North China's Hebei Province, was charged with taking 1.80 million yuan
(US$225,000) in bribery and sentenced 14 years in jail in June, 2006.
