MCLC: Zhou Yongkang arrested

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Zhou Yongkang arrested
Source: NYT (12/5/14)
China Arrests Ex-Security Chief, Zhou Yongkang, in Graft Case
By CHRIS BUCKLEY
Zhou Yongkang before relinquishing power in 2012. He is accused of bribetaking, leaking secrets and helping his allies enrich themselves at state expense. CreditAgence France-Presse — Getty Images
HONG KONG — Zhou Yongkang, the once-feared head of China’s domestic security, has been expelled from the Communist Party and arrested, the official state news agency announced early Saturday, disclosing a barrage of charges that included bribetaking, helping family members and cronies plunder government assets and leaking official secrets.
The move indicated that Mr. Zhou, once widely seen as invulnerable, was being held up by the party to show that top officials were not immune from punishment under President Xi Jinping.
The announcement signaled the biggest move yet in Mr. Xi’s two-year campaign to curb graft and malfeasance in the party hierarchy. Mr. Zhou, 72, became the first member of the elite Politburo Standing Committee, retired or active, to face criminal investigation in a corruption case. The state news media celebrated the decision as a confirmation that Mr. Xi was serious about cleaning up officialdom.
“Corruption is a cancer that has invaded the party’s healthy tissue,” said an editorial in People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper, on Saturday. “We must use investigating and dealing with Zhou Yongkang’s grave violations to thoroughly advance the struggle against corruption.”
The decision by the Communist Party Politburo, a council of 25 senior officials, to expel Mr. Zhou and place him under a legal investigation made it all but certain that he would face trial, conviction and a heavy sentence from one of the party-run courts that were once part of his political fief.
The Xinhua news agency, which issued the announcement, said the Politburo had made the decision on Friday.
“Zhou Yongkang’s actions were totally in contravention of the party’s essence and mission,” said the report, citing the Politburo decision. “This has severely damaged the party’s image, and brought major damage to the affairs of the party and the people.”
Separately, China’s top prosecution office, or procuratorate, which handles corruption inquiries, said that Mr. Zhou had been arrested. The office did not provide details of the charges.
Until now under Mr. Xi, the Communist Party anticorruption agency has investigated dozens of powerful officials, including Xu Caihou, a former People’s Liberation Army commander who confessed to taking enormous bribes, according to the official news media. But none of these fallen officials was as formidable as Mr. Zhou.
Mr. Zhou stepped down from power in November 2012, at the same congress that appointed Mr. Xi the party’s leader. For five years starting in 2007, Mr. Zhou held a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s top decision-making body, and at the same time he ran a committee overseeing the police and domestic security forces, as well as courts, prosecutors and prisons.
Soon after Mr. Zhou’s retirement, Mr. Xi and his allies started corruption investigations that targeted Mr. Zhou’s bases of power, especially Sichuan Province, in the southwest, and the country’s biggest oil and gas conglomerate, the China National Petroleum Corporation, where Mr. Zhou had risen to become a general manager.
State news outlets have said the party’s investigation of Mr. Zhou, which wasannounced in July, showed Mr. Xi’s determination to eradicate graft that had taken deep root in the government over previous decades.
But the charges now revealed against Mr. Zhou also appear likely to alarm people, because they indicate that China’s police and other domestic security agencies had been controlled by a deeply corrupt politician.
The investigators found that Mr. Zhou “exploited his position to obtain unlawful gains for multiple people, and directly or indirectly through his family took massive bribes,” the Xinhua report said.
In addition, the report said, Mr. Zhou “exploited his powers to help relatives, mistresses and friends make massive earnings through their business activities, creating massive losses for state-owned assets.”
Mr. Zhou also disclosed party and state secrets and traded favors and money for sex with multiple women, the report said. Party investigators examine a broader range of misdeeds than do crime investigators, and allegations of mistresses and paid sex are not usually prosecuted.
The announcement did not reveal further details behind the charges against Mr. Zhou. But the accusations that he exploited power to enrich family members and friends appeared to refer to Mr. Zhou’s longstanding influence in the energy sector, especially oil and gas, where he first rose up the party ranks.
An investigation by The New York Times documented that Mr. Zhou’s son, a sister-in-law and his son’s mother-in-law held assets worth about 1 billion renminbi, or $160 million, much of it in the oil and gas industries.
Last month, the website of People’s Daily published a commentary on the emerging allegations against Mr. Zhou, which described him as the ringmaster of five corrupt circles: Sichuan Province, the oil sector, the public security service, Mr. Zhou’s secretaries, and his family and relatives. Mr. Zhou formed a “commonwealth of crime,” said the commentary.
In China, criminal investigations of officials on corruption charges usually only start after party investigators have finished their inquiry. Mr. Zhou is now exceedingly unlikely to escape trial, conviction and a heavy prison sentence.
Human rights advocates and lawyers have said that Mr. Zhou bore major responsibility for reversing modest gains that China had made in giving citizens firmer legal protections. He became identified with a drive over the past decade to place courts, prosecutors and the police under firm party control, in the name of “stability maintenance.”
The party charges against Mr. Zhou did not mention those decisions and the abuses that they bred.
“We lawyers all believe that he took rule of law in China backwards at least a decade,” Li Xiaolin, a lawyer who has represented officials tried on corruption charges, said in an interview before the announcement about Mr. Zhou. “Now he’s become a victim of the lack of rule of law, because his case is also being dealt with by the legal system that he himself built with his own hands.”
by denton.2 at osu.edu on December 8, 2014
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center  
To stop receiving these emails, click here.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20141208/8b29d7fe/attachment.html>