China will strengthen efforts to bring back corrupt officials
who have fled abroad and several notorious criminals are expected
to be repatriated to the country this year, according to a former
senior security official?yesterday.
Speaking on the sidelines of the ongoing annual session of the
10th
National People's Congress, Zhu Entao, former assistant
minister of public security, said that Beijing is working hard on
the extradition issue with foreign countries to bring back the
criminals.
Among them are Lai Changxing, Yang Xiuzhu, Xu Chaofan and Xu
Guojun, leading characters in three separate embezzlement cases
which involve billions of yuan of State-owned assets.
Zhu said that after Yu Zhendong, former president of the Kaiping
branch of Bank of China in
Guangdong Province was brought back to China in 2004, his
accomplices, the two Xus, have been indicted in the United States
and are likely to be extradited this year.
The Canadian Government is evaluating the extradition of Lai
Changxing, the culprit who fled to Canada in 1999 after being
involved in a series of shocking bribery cases in Xiamen of east
China's
Fujian Province, said Zhu, an NPC deputy.
"Once the evaluation is finished, he will be sent back," he
said.
And Yang Xiuzhu, the former deputy director of the Construction
Department of east China's
Zhejiang Province who was arrested in the Netherlands last
year, is going through the legal procedure for extradition.
"We are confident that these people will ultimately be brought
back," he said.
In recent years, the country has been shocked by cases of senior
officials or bankers fleeing the country after embezzling or
misappropriating huge amounts of money.
Jia Chunwang, procurator-general of the Supreme People's
Procuratorate, said in his work report on Saturday that 703 corrupt
officials who tried to flee were detained last year and more than
7.4 billion yuan (US$912 million) recovered from them.
Zhu also warned that overseas-organized criminal groups were
trying to infiltrate the mainland and said his ministry would step
up efforts to nail them this year.
(China Daily March 13, 2006)