A total of 172 officials above county level in south China's Guangdong Province have been punished for embezzlement or accepting bribes since the beginning of the year.
Corrupt officials have been exposed in 1,060 major cases of embezzlement and accepting bribes. Bribes worth over 100 million yuan (US$12.05 million) were retrieved by local procuratorial organizations in the province, said Xu Tianxiang, deputy head of Guangdong Provincial Procuratorate, at a recent working meeting on anti-embezzlement and bribes.
According to Xu, also head of the procuratorate's anti-embezzlement bureau, local procuratorial organizations of Guangdong handled 3,295 cases involving embezzlement and bribes in the first ten months of the year, up 4.8 percent from the same period last year.
A total of 1,550 criminal cases were investigated, in which 1, 800 people were involved, both showing drastic increases from the same period last year, said Xu.
(Xinhua 11/21/2000)
