Authorities in Guangdong Province have arrested, prosecuted and punished 75 prefecture-level and 706 county-level Party and government officials over the past five years.

Provincial prosecutors announced the figures at their recent annual conference, saying they will never allow the province to become a hotbed of corruption.

They also promised to tackle more major cases of graft in the coming months.

Investigators recovered more than 2.2 billion yuan ($300 million) from 8,259 corruption cases, involving 9,131 local officials during the period.

Meanwhile, procuratorate departments worked with police to capture 295 fugitive suspects, including some who had fled overseas.

Yu Zhendong, formerly the head of the Kaiping city branch of the Bank of China, was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2006 after being repatriated from the United States.

Yu had collaborated with Xu Chaofan and Xu Guojun, two bank managers, in embezzling $82.5 million from the bank.

Public prosecutors in Guangdong province approved the arrests of 502,764 suspected criminals during the five-year period. Of that number, 477,098 were prosecuted, or about one-tenth of the national total.

(China Daily January 15, 2008)