Shanghai Graft Purge Widens With Death Sentence

A corruption investigation into a brash toll road operator in 2006 resulted in the detentions of hundreds of officials in Shanghai.

The former personal secretary to a powerful Chinese official has been sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, state media said, a sign of how high an anti-corruption purge against Shanghai leaders has reached.

Wang Weigong was the personal assistant to Huang Ju, a former vice-premier and one of the dozen most powerful officials in China, who died in 2007. Huang was a key ally of former president Jiang Zemin.

A corruption investigation into a brash toll road operator in 2006 resulted in the detentions of hundreds of officials in Shanghai and the fall of the city's powerful party secretary, Chen Liangyu.

Political observers in China interpreted the purge as a blow against the ongoing influence of Jiang, who formally handed over the last of his posts to current president Hu Jintao in 2004.

A senior official in his own right, Wang was convicted of taking bribes of nearly 13 million yuan ($1.90 million) between 1995 and 2006, the China Daily said on Tuesday.

He had brokered the relationship between Chen and the toll road operator, Zhang Rongkun, it said.

Wang was given the two-year reprieve because he cooperated in providing information and was sorry, the paper said. A reprieve means the sentence will usually be commuted to life in prison on good behaviour.