China executes housing official for embezzlement

China has executed a public housing official in the central province of Hunan after convicting him of embezzling 120 million yuan (18 million dollars), state media said Friday.

Li Shubiao, 46, was sentenced to death in August 2005 after he admitted using 120 million yuan of funds from Hunan's Chenzhou city for gambling and personal property investments, the China Daily newspaper reported.

Li, who was executed Thursday, told police he lost about 100 million yuan of public finds in casinos in Macau, the newspaper said.

State media have highlighted Li's prosecution over the past 5 years as a symbol of the ruling Communist Party's crackdown on corruption.

Li had served as the director of the Chenzhou Housing Provident Fund Centre, from which he started embezzling funds at least five years before his 2005 arrest, earlier reports said.

Many other city officials were convicted in corruption cases linked to Li, including Li Dalun, the former head of the Communist Party's Chenzhou branch.

The newspaper said the Chenzhou corruption scandal had become known as "the country's top case of embezzling government subsidy for housing."

The scandal broke in December 2003 after the murder of 2 local officials, one of whom had met Li Shubiao immediately before his death.

During police questioning over the murders, Li Shubiao confessed to embezzlement, leading to the "end of the Li Dalun era and the collapse of the collective image of the area's local government officials," the newspaper said earlier.

As the police widened their investigation into corruption in the city, more than 80 officials confessed to giving money to Li Dalun.

Yet at his sentencing in November 2008, Li Dalun was spared execution after he was convicted of accepting bribes totalling 14 million yuan and possessing assets valued at 18 million yuan for which he was unable to account.

Li Dalun was handed a death sentence suspended for 2 years, after which it would normally be commuted to life in prison.

The same court handed Zeng Jinchun, Chenzhou's former deputy party secretary, a death sentence without reprieve while former city mayor Zhou Zhengkun was sentenced to life in prison and Li Dalun's wife was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Judges in Changsha, Hunan's capital, said Li Dalun's crimes were "very serious and deserved the death penalty."

But they gave him a reprieve because he "voluntarily confessed to taking bribes that the judiciary authorities did not know about" and had "returned all his illegal earnings," the newspaper said.

China keeps the number of executions a state secret, but the US-based Dui Hua Foundation human rights group has estimated that at least 5,000 people have been executed annually in recent years, more than in the rest of the world combined.

The government claims to have limited the use of the death penalty in recent years but retains it for 68 offences, including drug trafficking, serious corruption and other non-violent crimes.

Source: Deutshce Presse-Agentur, March 26, 2010

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