Court officials tasked with carrying out sentences and managing auctions of confiscated assets are “prone to corruption and bribery,” according to Caijing magazine’s recent evaluation of corruption in China’s courts.
Nearly one-third of the corruption cases Caijing analyzed involved charges against these so-called “execution officials.”
In a case from 2008, an enforcement director for Xiangcheng District Court in Zhangzhou (Fujian Province) got 12 years for colluding with evaluation and auction agencies to sell seized land at a reduced price to a buyer who allegedly paid bribes.
Most of the officials the magazine surveyed worked for intermediate and higher courts.
Court presidents and deputy presidents accounted for 42 percent of the convicted officials in the Caijing sample.
The highest-ranking legal official to appear in Caijing’s report was former Supreme People’s Court deputy president Huang Songyou (pictured), who received a life sentence in 2010 for reaping a total of $830,000 in bribes and embezzled funds.
The report identified clusters of legal corruption cases in six cities: Shenzhen (Guangdong Province), Shenyang (Liaoning Province), Changsha (Hunan Province), Hengyang (Hunan), Wuhan (Hubei Province), and Fuyang (Anhui Province).
In March 2013, the Supreme People’s Court reported 1,548 legal officials were found to have abused their power between 2008 and 2012.
Source: Caijing (财经网)
A version of this post first appeared in the China Compliance Digest.
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