The former board chairman of the Northeast Expressway Co Ltd was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve after being convicted on five counts of corruption, including bribery.

Under a final ruling handed down on Tuesday by the Intermediate People's Court of Baicheng, Jilin Province, Zhang Xiaoguang was found guilty of taking bribes, corruption, embezzlement of public funds, illegally seeking private interest on behalf of relatives and possessing major assets for which he could not account, the Beijing News reported.

In addition to his convictions, Zhang was also stripped of his political rights for life and his personal property was confiscated.

The five counts involved 50 million yuan ($6.45 million), but there was no breakdown for each count.

According to the newspaper, Zhang's case is believed to be connected with another incident in which Gao Shan, former head of a branch of the Bank of China (BOC) on Hesong Street in Harbin, the capital of Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, allegedly siphoned 1 billion yuan ($130 million) from customers' accounts to Canada.

The Ministry of Public Security has asked Canada to extradite Gao, who fled after sending the funds to Canada in 2005, and another suspect, Li Dongzhe. They are under the surveillance of Canadian police.

Zhang's case was complex, as shown by the 36-page court verdict that ran to nearly 30,000 Chinese characters.

Zhang was first arrested on January 13, 2005, on charges of misappropriating public funds.

Northeast Expressway Co Ltd, a publicly listed company that operates an expressway, among other businesses, said two days later in a public announcement that 293 million yuan ($37.8 million) of its funds were missing from the BOC's Hesong Street branch. Shortly afterwards, Gao, chief of the branch, was discovered to have fled overseas.

Zhang's first trial commenced at the Intermediate People's Court of Baicheng in September, last year. However, it was soon called off at the request of public prosecutors for further investigation, following the detention of Dong Fang, former general manager of Donggao Science and Technologies Oils Co Ltd, a subsidiary of Northeast Expressway, who reportedly gave Zhang 10 million yuan in bribes.

Public prosecutors claimed in their indictment that Zhang deposited funds from his company at the BOC Hesong Street branch, after having accepted bribes from Li Dongzhe, the mastermind behind the BOC case, which eventually led to the loss of Northeast Expressway Co Ltd's money.

(Xinhua News Agency December 7, 2007)