China’s former justice minister, Fu Zhenghua has been sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for taking bribes and helping criminals including his brother.
Fu Zhenghua Jailed For Life
67-year-old, who was once one of China’s most powerful police chiefs, was handed a suspended death sentence that will be commuted to life imprisonment after two years, with no possibility of parole.
Fu was sentenced on Thursday after he pleaded guilty to abusing his powers in roles including minister and chief of police for the Chinese capital, Beijing, in 2005 – 2021 to hide crimes by his brother and others.
The former minister was convicted of accepting 117 million yuan (US$16.6 million) in bribes through gifts and money for personal gain.
CCTV report cited court documents that said Fu’s corruption went back to 2005, when he was deputy director of the Beijing Public Security Bureau, and that he and his family had continued to take bribes until he was detained by graft-busters in 2021.
When he was head of the Beijing PSB from 2014 to 2015, the court said Fu had “concealed clues to his younger brother Fu Weihua’s alleged serious crimes and did not deal with them in accordance with the law”. “As a result, Fu Weihua avoided prosecution for a long time,” it said.
The court said Fu Zhenghua had admitted all charges, shown remorse and provided information to investigators on other corruption cases.
But it said there would be no further commutation or parole granted after Fu’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment following the two-year reprieve due to the “serious harm caused to the country and society”.
The court described the bribes received by Fu as “particularly large”, the circumstances of his crimes as “particularly serious” and their social impact “particularly severe”.
Fu made a name for himself with a high-profile raid at Beijing’s exclusive Passion nightclub in 2010, just months after taking over as the capital’s police chief.
KanyiDaily had reported how El Salvador’s former president, Antonio Saca, serving a 10-year prison term for corruption, was sentenced to another two years for bribery.
