Former Chinese Minister of Justice Fu Zhenghua (傅政華), who led several high-profile investigations into corruption, has been jailed for life for accepting bribes, state media said yesterday, as a purge of officials intensified ahead of a key Chinese Communist Party (CCP) congress.
Fu, 67, was handed a suspended death sentence that would be commuted to life imprisonment after two years, with no possibility of parole, state media said.
Fu was deputy head of the Ministry of Public Security before becoming justice minister in 2018, leading many high-profile investigations and crackdowns including a probe beginning in 2013 of Zhou Yongkang (周永康), a former senior security official and the most powerful civil servant in modern China to be convicted of bribery.
Photo: REUTERS
In July, Fu admitted accepting bribes exceeding 117 million yuan (US$16.5 million).
Ahead of Fu’s trial in the northeastern city of Changchun, China’s anti-graft watchdog determined earlier this year that Fu had also been part of a “political gang” headed by former Chinese deputy minister of public security Sun Lijun (孫力軍) — one of the most prominent officials from the security apparatus to be targeted since Zhou’s conviction in 2015.
Sun in January admitted on state television that he had colluded with some senior law enforcement officials with the aim of personal enrichment.
Sun was also accused of not embracing Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) authority.
The influence of Sun, who has yet to receive his sentence, was so pervasive within the CCP that it had been described by authorities as “poisonous,” while they described Sun himself as like a “cancer” that needed to be eliminated.
On Wednesday, three former police chiefs of Shanghai, Chongqing and Shanxi Province were sentenced to years-long prison terms — including one for life — for corruption.
Like Fu, they had also been accused of being part of Sun’s clique and for being disloyal to Xi.
The purges came three weeks ahead of a once-in-five-years CCP National Congress, at which Xi is widely expected to secure a precedent-breaking third term.
CHAMPIONS: President Lai congratulated the players’ outstanding performance, cheering them for marking a new milestone in the nation’s baseball history Taiwan on Sunday won their first Little League Baseball World Series (LLBWS) title in 29 years, as Taipei’s Dong Yuan Elementary School defeated a team from Las Vegas 7-0 in the championship game in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania. It was Taiwan’s first championship in the annual tournament since 1996, ending a nearly three-decade drought. “It has been a very long time ... and we finally made it,” Taiwan manager Lai Min-nan (賴敏男) said after the game. Lai said he last managed a Dong Yuan team in at the South Williamsport in 2015, when they were eliminated after four games. “There is
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to start construction of its 1.4-nanometer chip manufacturing facilities at the Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP, 中部科學園區) as early as October, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported yesterday, citing the park administration. TSMC acquired land for the second phase of the park’s expansion in Taichung in June. Large cement, construction and facility engineering companies in central Taiwan have reportedly been receiving bids for TSMC-related projects, the report said. Supply-chain firms estimated that the business opportunities for engineering, equipment and materials supply, and back-end packaging and testing could reach as high as
POWER PLANT POLL: The TPP said the number of ‘yes’ votes showed that the energy policy should be corrected, and the KMT said the result was a win for the people’s voice The government does not rule out advanced nuclear energy generation if it meets the government’s three prerequisites, President William Lai (賴清德) said last night after the number of votes in favor of restarting a nuclear power plant outnumbered the “no” votes in a referendum yesterday. The referendum failed to pass, despite getting more “yes” votes, as the Referendum Act (公民投票法) states that the vote would only pass if the votes in favor account for more than one-fourth of the total number of eligible voters and outnumber the opposing votes. Yesterday’s referendum question was: “Do you agree that the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant
Democratic nations should refrain from attending China’s upcoming large-scale military parade, which Beijing could use to sow discord among democracies, Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Shen You-chung (沈有忠) said. China is scheduled to stage the parade on Wednesday next week to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. The event is expected to mobilize tens of thousands of participants and prominently showcase China’s military hardware. Speaking at a symposium in Taichung on Thursday, Shen said that Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) recently met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a visit to New Delhi.
RSS