Two senior Chinese Communist Party cadres with links to disgraced former security chief Zhou Yongkang have been sentenced to lengthy jail terms on corruption charges, part of a widespread crackdown on graft.
Jiang Jiemin, former head of the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission and once head of the China National Petroleum Corp, was sentenced to 16 years in prison in the central province of Hubei for bribery, possessing a large number of assets from unidentified sources and abuse of power, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Li Chuncheng, former deputy party secretary of Sichuan Province, was sentenced in a different court to 13 years of jail time for bribery and abuse of power. They were both accused of "illegally assisting other people in seeking profits under Zhou Yongkang's instruction and causing serious losses to public property".
The judgments were handed down two weeks ahead of a plenary session of the Central Committee of the Party, which will be held from October 26th-29th, and which is expected to hammer out the details of the next five-year plan to get China’s faltering economy on track.
Crackdown
President Xi Jinping has launched a major crackdown on official corruption, taking aim at both the massive wealth accumulated by the powerful “tigers” of the elite and the backhanders palmed over to the “flies” at the bottom of the Communist Party.
Both men accepted the verdict and said they would not appeal, Xinhua said. Their personal assets were confiscated. Mr Jiang’s confiscated assets are worth one million yuan (€140,000).
Last week, the country's top anti-graft watchdog said Su Shulin, governor of Fujian province and former head of the state energy giant Sinopec, had been put under investigation for corruption.
Mr Zhou, a former member of the standing committee of the Politburo, was sentenced in June to life imprisonment for accepting bribes, abuse of power and deliberately disclosing state secrets. He is the highest-level official to be convicted in the republic’s history.
Before becoming China's top security official, Mr Zhou was chairman of CNPC. Investigations into his allies marked the first step in a continuing investigation of China's vast, state-controlled oil industry.
CNPC is the country’s biggest oil company by volume and it holds sway over energy policy, and top CNPC officials regularly go on to serve as senior political leaders.
Mr Li had previously worked under Mr Zhou and was promoted to mayor of the Sichuan provincial capital Chengdu when Mr Zhou served as the party chief of Sichuan from 1999 to 2002.
