Chinese authorities have seized assets worth at least 90 billion yuan ($14.5 billion) from family members, political allies and friends of disgraced former security minister Zhou Yongkang, the man at the centre of China’s biggest corruption scandal in memory, Reuters reports.
More than 300 people connected to Zhou, including some of his relatives and staff, have been taken into custody or questioned by the authorities investigating the case over the past four months, unnamed sources said.
Two sources connected to the leadership said that prosecutors and the party’s anti-corruption watchdog had frozen bank accounts with deposits amounting to 37 billion yuan and seized stocks totalling 51 billion yuan after raiding homes in Beijing, Shanghai and five other provinces. Police also seized around 1.7 billion yuan in property, 1 billion yuan in art, and more than 60 vehicles during the investigation.
The size of the asset seizures and scale of the operations are unprecedented in modern China, indicating that President Xi Jinping is seeking to take down political graft at the highest levels. He announced in January 2013 that he would go after both “tigers” and “flies” whose corruption threatened the party.
But many have speculated that the investigation into Zhou has also been driven by his allegiance to former high-flying politician Bo Xilai, who was jailed for life in September 2013 for corruption and abuse of power. Zhou was the only member of the Standing Committee who opposed ousting his protege Bo when the scandal unfolded, leading to a full blown take-down of Zhou and effectively ending his career.
The most senior politician to be accused of corruption since the Communist Party rose to power in 1949, Zhou has been under house arrest since December 2013. Although the government has not officially stated his crimes, one of the anonymous sources said it is “the ugliest in the history of the New China”, and there are rumours that Zhou was once involved in a murder.
But Xi Jinping faces a challenge over how to proceed with Zhou’s case. Putting him on trial would be unprecedented - breaking an unwritten rule that exempts Standing Committee members from prosecution.
Xi is confronted by a Catch-22, where a desire to make an example of Zhou collides with the fear that a trial could further diminish public faith in the party. The decision to put such a powerful individual in the dock is a decision that only Xi could make following advice from other senior party members, the sources explained.
[Image via Reuters]
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