By CHRIS BUCKLEY in the NY Times, Oct 29, 2014
HONG KONG — China’s highest-reaching military corruption scandal of recent times moved toward trial on Tuesday, when investigators announced that a retired People’s Liberation Army commander, the former Gen. Xu Caihou, had confessed to taking enormous bribes in return for giving promotions and favors.
The announcement issued through Xinhua, the state news agency, also said that military prosecutors, called the military procuratorate in China, had on Monday officially finished their inquiry into Mr. Xu and were considering whether to put him on trial. That appears inevitable, given that the investigators said they concluded that he had taken “particularly huge bribes,” directly or through family members, in return for helping people win promotions or make unspecified personal gains.
“Xu Caihou fully confessed to the facts of his bribetaking crimes,” said the brief Xinhua report. It did not give any details of who gave the bribes or how much Mr. Xu took. The party authorities announced in late June that he was under investigation, after a secretive inquiry begun in March.
Mr. Xu has been one of the highest-ranking targets of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to rein in corruption in China. Until stepping down in late 2012, he was a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, the Communist Party’s body for running the military, and was also on the Politburo, the elite party council with 25 members.
Zhou Yongkang, the party’s previous head of domestic security, is the only former official publicly under investigation for corruption who ranked higher than Mr. Xu. Mr. Zhou was a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the innermost circle of party power.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/world/asia/china-Gen-Xu-Caihou-peoples-liberation-army-bribes.html?ref=asia
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