Leaders of Chinese City Sentenced in Graft Case

In a high-profile corruption case pointing to ties between local government leaders and organized crime, a Chinese court sentenced more than a dozen key officials in the country’s fifth-largest city, state-run media reported today.

Authorities sentenced Mu Suixin, the ex-mayor of Shenyang, to death with a two-year reprieve, a sentence that is usually commuted to life in prison. Shenyang’s vice mayor, Ma Xiangdong, was sentenced to death in the same case, state-run China Central Television reported.

“Other corruption cases have involved higher officials and bigger sums of money, but this is the biggest case to go public so far involving complicity between organized crime and officialdom,” said Hong Daode, a criminal law expert at the China University of Politics and Law.

Previously, the official press had lauded Mu for his economic reforms in Shenyang. Once the center of China’s heavy industry, the northeastern city of nearly 7 million residents has been hit by widespread unemployment as its obsolete state-run factories go bankrupt.

But in recent months, Chinese media have churned out lengthy reports detailing an alliance of political, business and criminal elites that ran Shenyang.

According to state media, the kingpin in the graft was 40-year-old Liu Yong, who was arrested in July 2000. He is awaiting trial. Forty-five of his associates, including eight police officers, were apprehended in January.

Liu, a Communist Party member, reportedly used his official connections at first for protection, then later as the building blocks of his business and criminal empires.

His godfather was the city’s top prosecutor, and his mistress was the vice chief of the municipal intermediate court. The vice chief of the labor department, his godmother, helped him secure an official position as delegate to Shenyang’s municipal legislature, the Beijing-based Lifeweek magazine reported.

Liu also headed the Jiayang Group, a conglomerate of 26 companies with more than $85 million in assets.

A slightly built man with a violent temper, Liu once disemboweled a fortuneteller who commented on his bad complexion, state-run media said. He and his henchmen blackmailed and assaulted rivals to his real estate and tobacco businesses, killing one and injuring 16, the official New China News Agency said.

In exchange for illegal tax breaks, Liu reportedly paid bribes to Ma and lent the vice mayor bodyguards for his trips to casinos in the former Portuguese colony of Macao, where Ma is said to have gambled away $4.8 million in public funds.

Official reports have not detailed Liu’s connection to Mu, who was convicted of taking bribes of more than $797,000 from 1993 to 2000.

Also sentenced in the case were 11 other Shenyang officials, including the city’s top judge and the heads of the city’s tax, fiscal and state asset bureaus.

Chinese officials deny that the country has Mafia-style crime syndicates, despite evidence to the contrary. And today’s official reports stressed that the convictions in Shenyang demonstrate Chinese leaders’ determination to ensure that “corrupt elements will have no place to hide within the Communist Party.”