China jails provincial boss over $36 million in bribes

A Chinese court yesterday handed a former top provincial official a suspended death sentence for bribery, it said, the latest senior politician to be jailed in a high-profile, anti-corruption campaign. Bai Enpei, the former top Communist Party official in the southwestern province of Yunnan was handed the sentence-usually commuted to life in prison-for accepting bribes worth more than 240 million yuan ($36 million) a court in Anyang city said on an official microblog.

Graft has become endemic in China and President Xi Jinping launched a much-publicized drive against corruption after he came to power in 2012, vowing to target both high-level “tigers” and low-ranking “flies”. But analysts say China has failed to implement institutional safeguards, such as an independent judiciary and free media, leaving antigraft campaigns subject to the influence of politics.

China’s ruling Communist Party promoted Bai to the top-ranking post in Yunnan from 2001 to 2011, before putting him under investigation in 2014. The court said he had accepted bribes in exchange for giving out rights to real estate and mining projects, and political promotions.

The sentence came as two other formerly highranking officials were charged with corruption, the official Xinhua news agency said yesterday.

Former boss of Hebei province in the north Zhou Benshun was charged with bribery, as was Yang Dongliang, China’s top work safety official until he was sacked last year. The Communist Party put Yang under internal investigation shortly after a massive explosion at a chemical storage warehouse in the northern port city of Tianjin killed 173 people in one of China’s worst workplace accident in decades.

Zhou Benshun, removed from his Hebei post last year, was a former aide to China’s ex-security czar Zhou Yongkang, the highest ranking official to have been jailed in the corruption crackdown since Xi took office.