HONG KONG — A Chinese court has sentenced the wife and son of the country’s former security chief to prison, a year after the family patriarch was sentenced to life in prison for corruption and leaking state secrets.
The Yichang City People’s Intermediate Court, about 800 miles south of Beijing, handed down a nine-year term to Jia Xiaoye, whose husband, Zhou Yongkang, was until 2012 one of China’s most powerful officials. His son by a previous marriage, Zhou Bin, received an 18-year prison sentence from the same court on Wednesday, China’s Central Television reported.
The court’s official social media site announced Ms. Jia’s sentence on June 8, but it was reported by China’s state news media only on Wednesday.
Zhou Yongkang, 73, was the highest-ranking official felled so far in President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corruption, now in its fourth year. Until November 2012, Mr. Zhou was a member of the Communist Party’s elite Politburo Standing Committee, overseeing the country’s criminal justice system and its huge police force. The sentencing of Mr. Zhou’s wife and son was announced on Mr. Xi’s 63rd birthday.
News of the trials of Zhou Yongkang’s wife and son was not made public, but neither were the trials a surprise. When Mr. Zhou was sentenced last June, the official news agency Xinhua said that Ms. Jia and Zhou Bin had accepted bribes amounting to more than $20 million.
The elder Mr. Zhou’s downfall was especially thorough: Dozens of his close political associates have also been imprisoned, and several of his family members disappeared into police custody. A 2014 New York Times investigation found that relatives of Mr. Zhou, including Zhou Bin, his sister-in-law and several other family members, controlled stakes in dozens of companies across China with combined assets of at least $150 million. The whereabouts of a second son, Zhou Han, are not known.
No pictures accompanied the terse announcement from the court on Ms. Jia’s sentencing. But Chinese state television did broadcast a clip from Zhou Bin’s trial. Balding, expressionless and bearing a striking resemblance to his square-jawed father, he was flanked by two police officers. He confessed to accepting more than $33 million in bribes and was fined more than $53 million, an indication of his wealth.
The China Central Television report said that Zhou Bin had used his father’s “power and status” to accumulate wealth through bribes and that he had received a reduced sentence because he had confessed, had “returned illegal gains” and had “expressed repentance.”
Ms. Jia also accepted her sentence, which included a fine amounting to about $152,000, the court said in its statement. Both said they would not appeal.
Ms. Jia, who is believed to be 47, worked at China Central Television as a presenter and was Mr. Zhou’s second wife. His first wife, Wang Shuhua, died. Zhou Bin, 44, studied in Texas and married an American woman of Chinese descent who lived in Southern California. He was the majority owner in a Beijing company that sold oil-services equipment to a state-owned petroleum company once run by his father.http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/16/world/asia/china-zhou-yongkang-jia-xiaoye.html?ref=asia
Comments are closed.