Report highlights corruption of China's SOE executives

BEIJING, Jan. 5 -- Thirty-five senior executives of China's large state-owned enterprises (SOE), such as former Sinopec chairman Chen Tonghai, faced corruption charges last year.

A report by Faren Magazine, affiliated to the Legal Daily and overseen by the Ministry of Justice, examined 95 serious criminal cases of executives of both state and private companies last year.

Thirty-one of the SOE executives were found to be involved in cases involving an average of 110 million yuan (16.18 million U.S. dollars).

Of those, 28 were charged with taking bribes, 16 with embezzlement and eight with misappropriation of public funds, the report said.

The only case still under investigation was that of Kang Rixin, who was removed in August as party secretary and general manager of the state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC).

He also served as a member of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the party's internal anti-graft body.

Another prominent case was that of Chen Tonghai, former general manager of China Petrochemical Corporation, who was found to have taken almost 200 million yuan in bribes and given a death sentence with a two-year reprieve in July.

The report said two SOE executives were sentenced to death last year for graft.

Li Peiying, former president of the Capital Airports Holding Company, was executed in August after he was found guilty of bribery and corruption.

An investigation showed Li received about 26.61 million yuan in bribes.

Yang Yanming, a former senior trader with a Chinese securities company, was executed last month after being convicted of embezzling and misappropriating 94.52 million yuan of public funds from 1998 to 2003.

The report also detailed crimes such as murder and poisoning, committed by some private enterprise heads last year.

Billionaire Wang Wenxiang was sentenced to death last month for hiring two people to murder a former business partner.

The owner of Xinheng Corporation, involved in a range of industries including real estate, power, wholesale and retail, graduated from the elite Tsinghua University and was a political advisor in the northeastern Heilongjiang Province.