A vice governor of China's corruption-wracked southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region has been arrested and will be tried for accepting some 832,000 yuan (100,000 dollars) in bribes, state press said Wednesday.
Liu Zhibing was formally arrested by judicial authorities after being expelled from the Communist Party on the orders of the central committee, Xinhua news agency said.
Liu has been a top Guangxi party official since 1995 and was promoted under the leadership of former top Guangxi head Cheng Kejie, who was convicted of massive corruption and executed in September 2000.
Xinhua did not directly link Liu to Cheng's case, only saying that he was also charged with interfering in a major criminal case involving his daughter and having "committed adultery with married woman".
Cheng Kejie served as head of the Guangxi government from 1992 to 1998. He was then transferred to Beijing and promoted by Li Peng, the chairman of the National People's Congress, as one of his 19 vice chairmen.
He was executed for accepting 4.58 million dollars in bribes during his tenure as the head of the Guangxi government, becoming the highest-level communist official to be sentenced to death for corruption.
Liu's case came to light earlier than Cheng's, but it was unclear why it took nearly two years for his case to be handed over from the party disciplinary commission to the judicial authorities.
Scores of other Guangxi official have been arrested and convicted of corruption in recent years, including another former Guangxi vice governor, Xu Bingsong, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in late 1999 for a 66,000-dollar corruption scam -- AFP
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