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Liu Tienan, former top Chinese energy official, sentenced to life in jail for corruption
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 10 December, 2014, 10:11am
UPDATED : Wednesday, 10 December, 2014, 8:49pm
Mandy Zuo [email protected]
Liu Tienan, former head of the National Energy Administration, has received a life sentence for taking over 35 million yuan in bribes. Photo: Reuters
Former top energy official and economic policymaker Liu Tienan has been sentenced to life in prison by a Hebei court for bribery and abuse of power.
The sentence was passed in the Intermediate People’s Court in Langfang city, Hebei, on Wednesday morning.
Liu, former deputy chief of the National Development and Reform Commission, was earlier been found guilty of taking more than 35 million yuan (HK$44.2 million) in bribes from five companies, including petrochemical producers and carmakers, from 2002 to 2012. Part of the bribes was collected via his son Liu Decheng, the court heard.
Liu Tienan’s case was heard in late September, when he pleaded guilty and broke down in tears expressing remorse as he gave his statement in court.
Despite the large amount of money involved in the corruption case, prosecutors pleaded for leniency for Liu, citing his cooperative attitude while under investigation. They said the former official had volunteered a lot of information on bribes he had taken that the investigators had not previously known about.
Liu said he had been living in repentance and that he had not only hurt his family but also brought shame to the Communist Party.
Liu was an official of vice-ministerial rank at the NDRC, the powerful planning agency charged with steering the world’s second-largest economy. He was at the same time director of the National Energy Administration under the NDRC.
But despite his important role in Chinese policymaking, Liu’s judgment and sentencing has not attracted much attention from the online community. The Langfang court’s Weibo account, which carried the pronouncement of the sentence in real time, had just a few thousand followers, and its post about Liu’s verdict saw only a few dozen shares.
Professor Zhang Ming, who specialises in political science at Renmin University, said the online community was more interested in the fate of higher-ranking official Ling Jihua, who used to be top aide to former president Hu Jintao.
“There are just so many big tigers [high-ranking officials] that people have become numb to the news on Liu,” Zhang said.
Public interest might have also been muted by a presumption about the outcome. “There was an unspoken consensus that no death sentence would be given”, unlike in the corruption trials of other officials.
The party’s anti-corruption watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, announced in May last year that Liu was under investigation. He was the first ministerial-level central government official to be suspended from his position and expelled from the party after President Xi Jinping took over party leadership in late 2012 and launched the anti-graft campaign.
