The man entrusted with building possibly the world's largest network of ringroads, around China's expanding capital, Beijing, has been handed over for criminal investigation for taking huge bribes, state media said yesterday.
Bi Yuxi, head of the Capital Road Development Corporation and a deputy director of the Beijing City Transport office, had been expelled from the Communist Party for his "degenerate" behavior and was under investigation, the Beijing Youth Daily said in a front-page article.
"He several times accepted huge bribes," the newspaper said. "Bi Yuxi was morally degenerate and his lifestyle was decadent and dissolute."
He had been handed over to judicial authorities for criminal investigation, the newspaper said. Chinese media, unrestrained by contempt of court laws of the West, often quote police confirming a defendant's guilt or confession before a case has come to court.
It is the first major corruption case to break in the capital, Beijing, since President and party chief Hu Jintao took over the party in November 2002 and his state post in March last year.
It was unclear how wide the net would be cast or whether other officials with the firm -- closely linked with the Beijing government -- were under investigation.
The case is the latest sign of worsening graft in China. More than 20,000 corruption cases were investigated in the first six months of this year, Procurator-General Jia Chunwang (
Jia gave no comparison with the number of cases a year earlier, but said 713 involved sums of 1 million yuan (US$120,000) or more, up 6.9 percent from a year earlier.
A Chinese source familiar with the probe into the construction of huge ringroads around the capital said Bi had implicated other corporate leaders after being detained in April on suspicion of embezzling as much as 60 million yuan (US$7.25 million).
"I just took tea money," Bi was quoted as saying by the source.
"If all he took was tea money, what did the others take? Food money?" the source said.
Beijing's entrenched political leadership has been a regular target of corruption investigations.
In the mid-1990s, former president and party chief Jiang Zemin (
Beijing also has come under fire for awarding land rights to developers for minimal fees -- a system officials with the central government's Ministry of Land and Resources described as "full of loopholes that invite corruption," the influential Caijing magazine reported in June.
Such loopholes let developers buy rights to state-owned land in 2002 and 2003 that nearly matched the rights granted in the entire preceding decade, Caijing said.
But the ministry this year ordered all rights to be determined through auctions and tenders and set a deadline of Aug. 31 -- the "831 Big Deadline" -- for developers to pay up 120 billion yuan (US$14.50 billion) in fees or forfeit the rights.
China's leaders have warned in recent years that the Communist Party faces self-destruction if it fails to crack down on corruption, a scourge that toppled several imperial dynasties.
Corruption was virtually wiped out in the years after the Communists came to power in 1949 but has staged a comeback in the wake of economic reforms introduced in the late 1970s.
Of the total 24,247 people under investigation for corruption in the first half of the year, 1,690 were officials of county magistrate or higher levels, the China Daily said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS