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Tuesday 24 February 2009
Top official fired over pyramids ‘study trip’
The government has sacked a senior official for misconduct after internet users uploaded a video of a delegation enjoying a tour of the pyramids in Egypt on a government-funded “study” trip, mainland media reported yesterday.
The government has sacked a senior official for misconduct after internet users uploaded a video of a delegation enjoying a tour of the pyramids in Egypt on a government-funded “study” trip, mainland media reported yesterday.
Overseas “study” trips have long been a perk enjoyed by mainland bureaucrats, with travel itineraries often skewed more towards pleasure than business.
Internet-led witch-hunts by mainland Web surfers, known as “human flesh search engines”, have gleefully exposed a string of officials enjoying excessive leisure time on the public purse, leading to media criticism and sackings.
A post titled “Overseas study or overseas travel?” that spread across mainland portals in recent days shows a video of 13 public servants from Zhaoqing, Guangdong province, living it up on a 14-day tour to Africa and the Middle East in 2007.
Apart from visiting the pyramids and Sphinx in Egypt, the 17-minute video posted on a blog on Sina.com shows them touring Table Mountain in Cape Town, riding jeeps in the desert and visiting an ostrich farm.
One scene shows officials laughing and dancing with models on a catwalk in Istanbul. Another shows them touring Dubai’s iconic Burj Al Arab hotel.
Narrated by an unseen male and female, and sometimes accompanied by hip hop music, the video appears to be specially edited to package the officials’ holiday memories.
The delegation, led by a Duanzhou district Communist Party official, also included officials of the local government’s finance and legal affairs bureau and “discipline and inspection” office, the department responsible for checks and balances.
Each of the officials’ titles appears in the video but the names are obscured. It was not clear how the video came to be circulated on the internet.
The city’s disciplinary office had confirmed the trip had been funded by public money and sacked Duanzhou’s deputy Communist Party secretary, a Guangzhou Daily report posted on Sina.com said.
Other officials were under investigation and had been ordered to pay back the money for the trip, which amounted to about 450,000 yuan (HK$511,000), the report said.
In the absence of any meaningful independent checks and balances on official abuses of office, mainland internet users have become a de facto anti-corruption force in recent years.
Several officials from Wenzhou, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, were dismissed in December after an internet user uploaded scanned images of receipts detailing luxury-hotel and sightseeing costs for their “study trip” to the United States.
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Top official fired over pyramids ‘study trip’
Reuters in Beijing
24 February 2009
The government has sacked a senior official for misconduct after internet users uploaded a video of a delegation enjoying a tour of the pyramids in Egypt on a government-funded “study” trip, mainland media reported yesterday.
Overseas “study” trips have long been a perk enjoyed by mainland bureaucrats, with travel itineraries often skewed more towards pleasure than business.
Internet-led witch-hunts by mainland Web surfers, known as “human flesh search engines”, have gleefully exposed a string of officials enjoying excessive leisure time on the public purse, leading to media criticism and sackings.
A post titled “Overseas study or overseas travel?” that spread across mainland portals in recent days shows a video of 13 public servants from Zhaoqing, Guangdong province, living it up on a 14-day tour to Africa and the Middle East in 2007.
Apart from visiting the pyramids and Sphinx in Egypt, the 17-minute video posted on a blog on Sina.com shows them touring Table Mountain in Cape Town, riding jeeps in the desert and visiting an ostrich farm.
One scene shows officials laughing and dancing with models on a catwalk in Istanbul. Another shows them touring Dubai’s iconic Burj Al Arab hotel.
Narrated by an unseen male and female, and sometimes accompanied by hip hop music, the video appears to be specially edited to package the officials’ holiday memories.
The delegation, led by a Duanzhou district Communist Party official, also included officials of the local government’s finance and legal affairs bureau and “discipline and inspection” office, the department responsible for checks and balances.
Each of the officials’ titles appears in the video but the names are obscured. It was not clear how the video came to be circulated on the internet.
The city’s disciplinary office had confirmed the trip had been funded by public money and sacked Duanzhou’s deputy Communist Party secretary, a Guangzhou Daily report posted on Sina.com said.
Other officials were under investigation and had been ordered to pay back the money for the trip, which amounted to about 450,000 yuan (HK$511,000), the report said.
In the absence of any meaningful independent checks and balances on official abuses of office, mainland internet users have become a de facto anti-corruption force in recent years.
Several officials from Wenzhou, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, were dismissed in December after an internet user uploaded scanned images of receipts detailing luxury-hotel and sightseeing costs for their “study trip” to the United States.
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