China’s top prosecuting body has launched a six-month campaign targeting corruption suspects, especially those who have fled overseas, as the government ramps up its crackdown on graft, Xinhua news agency reported yesterday, after a former executive with a state-run shipping firm was charged with taking bribes on Friday.
The Supreme People’s Procuratorate on Friday said in a notice on its Web site that Gu Tiquan (顧逖泉), the former board chairman of the Shanghai-based, state-run Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding shipyard, would be prosecuted. It did not give details.
Hudong-Zhonghua is a subsidiary of China State Shipbuilding Corp, one of the largest shipbuilding conglomerates in the country. The yard has been leading China’s push into high-tech shipbuilding and currently has contracts to build 14 liquefied natural gas tankers.
Photo: Reuters
Calls to Hudong-Zhonghua for comment were not answered as the office was closed for the weekend, while reporters were unable to reach Gu for comment.
China’s campaign against graft, which has ensnared officials across industries such as banking and energy, was extended to the shipping industry in November last year after it launched investigations into an executive at state-run China COSCO Holdings
Yesterday, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP) said it would use the nation’s confiscation rules more vigorously to prevent corrupt officials from benefiting from their gains and urged prosecutors to collaborate with other departments such as the police and courts to improve the system’s efficiency.
“The authority of law must be resolutely upheld and crimes must be strongly cracked down and deterred,” Xinhua said, citing a statement issued after an SPP conference on the campaign.
The Ministry of Public Security in July launched a “fox hunt” to pursue economic fugitives, seen as the latest focus of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government’s far-reaching anti-corruption campaign.
Extraditing economic fugitives back to China is seen as a tricky task, as there is no extradition treaty between China and the US and foreign governments have expressed reluctance to hand over Chinese suspects for fear that they could face the death penalty in China.
Last month, a senior official at the ministry was cited by state media as saying that 150 economic fugitives, many of whom are corrupt officials or suspected of graft in China, were at large in the US.
The SPP’s campaign is to focus on key targets and cases and plans to make full use of multilateral and bilateral judicial agreements and treaties to conduct international cooperation, Xinhua said.
It also urged Chinese prosecutors to strengthen their knowledge of foreign law to improve their ability to deal with suspects and illegal gains abroad.
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