Another 7 charged in election fraud case
Print Edition
Another seven people have been charged in connection with an election fraud case involving more than 500 lawmakers in the central Chinese city of Hengyang, prosecutors said yesterday, taking the total number of suspects charged so far to 58.
Zhou Ji and six others are charged with dereliction of duty and disrupting the election, the Hunan Provincial People’s Procuratorate said. Their jobs or titles weren’t revealed.
After a tip-off in February last year, an investigation was launched into claims that 56 candidates elected as deputies to the provincial legislature had offered 110 million yuan (US$17.90 million) in bribes to 518 city lawmakers and 68 staffers to make sure they were elected.
On December 28, the provincial legislature disqualified the 56 lawmakers, and legislative bodies in Hengyang accepted the resignations of 512 people said to have taken bribes during the election between December 28, 2012 and January 3, 2013.
In January this year, Tong Mingqian, Hengyang’s Party chief in charge of the election, was fired as the provincial advisory body’s vice chairman and expelled from the Party.
He failed to take “timely and effective measures” in face of reports about the vote-buying scandal, the Party’s disciplinary commission said.
The scandal had inflicted “great losses to the interests of the Party, country and the people, and leaves a harmful political and social impact,” the commission said on its website.
It said Tong’s case had been handed to judicial authorities.
On January 24, Hengyang re-elected 60 provincial legislators.
Hu Guochu, former chairman of the Standing Committee of the Hengyang People’s Congress, is already under judicial investigation for suspected involvement in election fraud.
Fu Ying, spokeswoman for the National People’s Congress, yesterday vowed “zero tolerance” of election fraud.
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