China sentences official to death over bribes

A Chinese local official has been sentenced to death for taking bribes worth more than £240m over three decades.

Yang Youlin, a former economic development official in the Jiangsu Province capital of Nanjing near China’s east coast, “illegally accepted property and assets” valued at more than 2.21bn yuan (£243m) from 1993 to 2023, the Changzhou Intermediate People’s Court said in a statement.

Yang was investigated as part of Xi Jinping’s decade-long anti-corruption campaign that critics say has been used partly to remove the president’s political rivals.

The bribes were paid in exchange for help with “undertaking projects, business operations, land grants and working capital”, the court said.

Yang also was convicted of embezzlement, offering bribes, misappropriation of public funds, abuse of power and money laundering in one of the most dramatic corruption cases in recent years in terms of the sheer scale of the bribes involved.

He delivered a final statement in court that “expressed his guilt and remorse”, the court’s statement said. In the photos released by the court, a grey-haired Yang is wearing a dark jacket and standing between two uniformed police officers.

Public hearings for the case were held on two days in March and April. The court statement said Yang’s personal property would be confiscated and that authorities would try to recover the full amount he received in bribes.

Yang was the latest official sentenced to death for corruption in recent years.

In 2021, Lai Xiaomin, a party secretary of a state-owned company, was sentenced to death and executed for crimes of accepting bribes, embezzlement and bigamy. In 2024, Li Jianping, a local official in Inner Mongolia, was executed after being found guilty of embezzlement and bribery.-Telegraph

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