A Chinese court has sentenced a former senior municipal official from Nanjing, in the east of the country, to capital punishment, after finding it proven that he illicitly received about 2.2 billion yuan, equivalent to about 300 million euros, in bribes. This is one of the harshest sentences handed down in recent years for economic crimes.
The convicted man, Yang Youlin, who held the position of deputy executive director of the management committee of the Nanjing Economic and Technological Development Zone, has been found guilty not only of accepting bribes, but also of embezzlement, misappropriation of public funds, abuse of power, and money laundering.
The Changzhou People's Court, located in Jiangsu province, has issued an "accumulated" death sentence, a formula that implies the deprivation of his political rights for life and the total confiscation of his assets, according to information released by the newspaper "South China Morning Post".
The illegally obtained profits have been confiscated and will be incorporated into the public treasury. Investigations indicate that the criminal activities lasted for about thirty years, approximately between 1993 and 2023, a period during which he provided illicit advantages to various companies and individuals.
According to the judicial ruling, Yang fraudulently intervened in engineering contracts, commercial operations, land transfers, and financial transactions, obtaining exorbitant bribes in return. The amount of these illegal payments alone exceeds that of numerous previous corruption cases and is among the highest amounts ever recognized by a court in China.