A corrupt high-level Beijing official’s exploits with mistresses and real estate developers have been made into a documentary that is being broadcast to Communist Party members nationwide as authorities wage war on corruption.
The documentary said a single real estate developer deposited about 400,000 yuan into Zhou’s bank account every day for three weeks in 2003, as payment for a lucrative hotel construction project.
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Corrupt official’s exploits made into anti-graft documentary
Fiona Tam
10 April 2009
A corrupt high-level Beijing official’s exploits with mistresses and real estate developers have been made into a documentary that is being broadcast to Communist Party members nationwide as authorities wage war on corruption.
Zhou Liangluo, 50, former party chief of Haidian district and once a rising political star, was the focus of the country’s latest anti-graft propaganda piece after he was given a suspended death sentence last year for misappropriating more than 16 million yuan (HK$18 million), the Beijing Times reported yesterday.
The documentary said most of the bribes had come from property developers for land grabs and project approvals, and that his wife, Lu Xiaodan, was jailed for life for her involvement in 8 million yuan’s worth of the bribes that Zhou took.
Besides cash bribes, developers also paid for Zhou’s mistresses and offered them performance-oriented bonuses according to their abilities to entertain the former party chief. Disciplinary authorities said they hoped that Zhou’s confession would be a clear warning to officials about corruption.
“I was afraid of taking the huge amount of bribes but couldn’t resist it ... I gradually believed that accepting bribes was natural and normal after offering assistance to developers as a high-ranking official,” the jailed former official told interviewers.
The documentary said a single real estate developer deposited about 400,000 yuan into Zhou’s bank account every day for three weeks in 2003, as payment for a lucrative hotel construction project.
Zhou later accepted a villa worth 2 million yuan after naming another real estate company to construct a commercial building for the district government in 2005.
Mainland government officials are notorious for corruption at all levels. Beijing’s top prosecutor said at least 41,179 officials were investigated across the nation last year.
Many netizens poke fun at the huge number of corrupt officials, saying those arrested provide endless material for exposes and ever more anti-corruption documentaries.
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