Agence France Presse
June 6, 2006
BEIJING — China has sentenced to death an official who embezzled nearly 1.5 million dollars from the controversial Three Gorges dam project, a court official told AFP Friday. The former director of the district construction bureau in Fengdu received the death sentence on February 25 for stealing 12 million yuan (1.44 million dollars), a court spokesman in southwestern Chongqing city said. Reports of massive graft have swirled around the construction of the world’s biggest hydroelectric dam on the Yangtze River since it began in 1994, but this is the first death penalty handed down. China’s auditor general said in January that around 600 million dollars earmarked for the resettlement of those made homeless by the project had been embezzled, 12 percent of the entire relocation budget. The official press on Friday, however, revised the embezzled figure down to 7.4 percent of the relocation budget. The Chongqing court spokesman also revealed that an official from the migration bureau in Wanzhou district near the city was jailed for life in May last year for corruption.