Over 900 nabbed in China crackdown on coal mining sector corruption this year

BEIJING - The campaign against corruption in the coal-mining sector has reportedly led to the punishing of a total of 906 government officials in North China’s Shanxi province in the past 11 months.

In the 11 months to November, the province received 759 reports of corruption and seven department-level government officials were sacked.

China Daily quoted the provincial government’s supervision department as saying that the officials, including a former vice-mayor and the former public security head of Datong city, were found to have received bribes or committed other crimes related to the coal mining sector.

Xing Shunxi, Deputy Director of the supervision department of Shanxi government, has said that during the campaign, launched in July 2008, 2,353 people so far have been punished in 2,185 cases.

An amount of 30.4 billion Yuan (4.6 billion dollars) of illegal funds, a figure equal to one-third of the provincial government’s revenue in 2009, has been retrieved, the paper said.

Shanxi, known for its coal industry, possesses 260 billion tons of known coal deposits that are about one-third of the country’s coal resources.

Xing further said that the anti-corruption campaign is focused on detecting officials who have invested in the coal industry, a practice that is banned in China, and those taking bribes or illegally reselling State assets during property reconstruction.

According to official figures, in the past 60 years Shanxi has produced 12 billion tons of coal, of which 75 percent had been transported to other regions, the paper said. (ANI)