THE high-profile anti-graft campaign brought down a series of high ranking officials in 2006, of whom nine provincial or ministerial-level officials were jailed, chief justice Xiao Yang said yesterday.

A total of 825 convicted government officials above the county level were sentenced last year, Xiao, president of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC), said in a work report to the annual session of the National People’s Congress (NPC).

“Of the convicted, nine were provincial or ministerial-level officials and 92 were at the prefecture level,” he said.

One of the most notorious convicted officials in 2006 was Ding Xinfa, a former provincial procurator general of eastern Jiangxi Province, who was sentenced to 17 years for bribery and embezzlement.

The disgraced list also included Li Dachang, former vice governor of southwestern Sichuan Province, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for power abuse.

In the most recent case, Xing Xiaoming, a former official of the finance department under the Ministry of Finance, was sentenced to nine years in prison for taking bribes, the Beijing Times reported yesterday.

Xing is the third official from the department to be sentenced for corruption after Xu Fangming, department head, and Wang Rui, Xing’s deputy.

Xing’s boss Xu was sentenced to life imprisonment last September for obtaining more than 2.14 million yuan (US$267,500) in bribes, while Wang was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Chinese courts heard 23,733 cases of embezzlement, bribery and dereliction of duty in 2006, among which 8,310 were bribery cases involving government officials, according to Xiao’s report.

In a separate report delivered to nearly 3,000 lawmakers, top prosecutor Jia Chunwang said enhancing crackdown on job-related crimes was one of the priorities of the country’s procuratorial bodies in 2006.

The procuratorial authorities placed 33,668 cases on file for investigation for corruption, bribery and other job-related crimes in 2006. (Xinhua)

CHINA will launch a national corruption prevention bureau this year, a chief discipline inspector with the Communist Party of China (CPC) said Monday, as the country pursues its drive against graft.

Xia Zanzhong, deputy chief of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CPC and a deputy to the National People’s Congress (NPC), said the plan to set up such a bureau had been approved by the State Commission Office for Public Sector Reform, without specifying when it will be established.

According to Xia, the framework of the bureau has been established and such bureaus will be set up at provincial level in the future.

The bureau is set to strengthen anti-graft education for officials, bolster the legal system’s ability to tackle corruption, and help to better monitor the use and abuse of power. The bureau will work under the guidance of the Ministry of Supervision.

(Wei Jie)