A Chinese court in the eastern region has sentenced a 69-year-old former city official to death for an eye-opening bribery scandal.
Yang Youlin, who served in various positions in Nanjing city from 1993 to 2023, has been charged with taking more than 2.2 billion yuan ($325 million) in bribes over three decades.
He was also convicted of embezzlement, abuse of power and money laundering, with his unlawful gains making it one of the biggest bribery cases in China.
According to state media, in exchange for money and valuables, Yang abused his role to help others secure engineering contracts, land transfers and financing.
President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption efforts
The 69-year-old was investigated as part of President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption crackdown, which has rooted out allegedly corrupt officials from military, banking and other sectors.
Yang, who spent much of his career working on economic and technological development in Nanjing, had committed offences "of an extremely serious nature" and "caused exceptionally heavy losses to the state and the people", a court in Changshou city said on Monday, July 6.
The court also found that between 2014 and 2016, Yang and his co-conspirators embezzle 12 million yuan in government funds.
He also paid more than 25 million yuan in bribes to other state officials to secure unlawful benefits, misappropriated 15 million yuan of public funds for private business operations, and caused 23 million yuan in direct economic losses to the state through unauthorised property demolitions and illegal land fee refunds.
Death sentence in China over bribery charges
While death sentences are rare for white collar crimes, they are handed out if the cases involve sums exceeding 1 billion yuan.
This is not the first case where the court ordered a death sentence; former finance chief Lai Xiaomin was executed in 2021 for taking 1.8 billion yuan in bribes over a 10-year period.
Li Jianping, a former Inner Mongolia official, was also executed in 2024 for embezzling and taking more than 3 billions in bribes.
In many cases, the courts handed out jail terms or suspended death sentences, which get commuted to life imprisonment after a specified duration.
The courts have also reduced sentences in some cases where the convicted individuals reported on other offenders.
However, while Yang provided assistance to authorities, his offences were so "grave" that his assistance "was insufficient to warrant a more lenient punishment", the Changzhou court said.
Yang pleaded guilty and "expressed remorse in his final statement", according to state media.
