Chinese court sentences ex-official to death for decades of bribery
July 7 (UPI) -- A Chinese court has sentenced a former executive deputy director of a government management committee to death for taking bribes worth more than $323.7 million in property over a 30-year period.
Yang Youlin, the 69-year-old former executive deputy director of the Nanjing Economic and Technological Development Zone Management Committee, was sentenced by the Changzhou Intermediate People's Court over the scheme on Monday, the court said in a statement. All his personal property was also confiscated.
The court said he illegally accepted the bribes from corporations and individuals whom he helped "in matters including undertaking projects, business operations, land transfers and capital turnover" from 1993 through 2023.
He also received a number of sentences ranging from six months to 11 years and six months, along with fines, on related charges, including embezzlement, offering bribes, misappropriating public funds, abuse of power and money laundering.
Yang was sentenced after public hearings held March 18 and April 28, during which prosecutors presented evidence, and Yang's defense cross-examined evidence. According to the court, Yang made a final statement in which he pleaded guilty and expressed remorse over his actions.
The court said that although Yang exposed the criminal conduct of others, "considering the facts, nature and circumstances of his bribery offense and the degree of harm it caused to society, this was insufficient to warrant lenient punishment."
"The court said Yang's bribery amount was especially huge, the circumstances of his crimes were especially serious, the social impact was especially egregious and his actions caused especially major losses to the interests of the state and the people," the statement said.
"His crimes were extremely serious and, according to law, warranted the death penalty."
Yang was tried amid President Xi Jinping's yearslong anti-corruption campaign that, according to a March 2025 report from the United States' Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has seen nearly 5 million officials investigated and found guilty since 2012.
While ostensibly an anti-corruption campaign, the DNI report said that it targets "political indiscipline and ideological impurity," particularly at the highest levels of government, to preserve the Chinese Communist Party's domestic control and legitimacy.
China does not make its executions public but is widely believed to lead the world in this category.
In 2024, Li Jianping, a former Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region official, was executed for bribery and other related charges, including collusion with a criminal syndicate.
In late January 2021, China executed Lai Xiaomin, former board chairman of China Huarong Asset Management Co., after being found guilty of bribery, embezzlement and bigamy.
Ilhan Omar’s 30 Million Dollars Have Vanished Into Thin Air, and She Doesn’t Want to Talk About It
New in PJ Media:
Talk about bad luck. But the winsome and patriotic Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu) is handling it with her customary equanimity and grace, and in doing so, is giving all of us a lesson in how to deal with adversity.
It seems, you see, that Ilhan Omar had $30 million, and now she doesn’t have it, but she doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned about where it went. Easy come, easy go, right? Allah giveth and Allah taketh away. And sometimes Allah moveth Ilhan Omar and her accountants, under the cloud of possible ethics charges, to try to explain away the disappearance of $30 million as a simple clerical error, the sort of thing anybody could do, you know, when you forget to carry the two or something. Truly, Allah’s ways are most wondrous, and mysterious to the eyes of mere mortals.
And it may be because of her overflowing piety that Omar simply doesn’t want to talk about the missing $30 million. She has more important things to do, after all. Above all, she has to serve her constituents. Omar has won praise from a former Somali prime minister for making her highest priority not “the interest of Minnesota, nor is it the interest of the American people, the interest of Ilhan is that of the Somali people and Somalia.”
The good folks of Somalia need honest, energetic representation, and that’s what Ilhan Omar is in Washington for. How can this selfless public servant be expected to turn her attention from the well-being of the Somali people to some piddling, impertinent questions about a few missing millions?
And so it was altogether fitting and proper that Omar should stonewall some insolent kuffar who tried to make a mountain out of this particular molehill. Fox News reported Thursday that Omar “refused to address her revised financial disclosures that could imply she has a negative net worth after the progressive lawmaker dramatically reduced the reported value of assets tied to her husband’s business ventures.”
The audacious infidel from Fox News Digital, no doubt a “white supremacist” as well as an “Islamophobe,” dared to ask Omar: “Can you tell us if your husband still has the consulting business and the wine business?” This was an important question for both Omar and her husband Tim Mynett (no, this one’s not her brother; that was an earlier husband). As Fox explains, “in Omar’s 2024 financial disclosure records, Mynett’s share in his winery was valued between $1 million and $5 million, and his share at the venture capital advisory firm was valued between $5 million and $25 million. Now, his equity interests are both listed at $0.”
There is more. Read the rest here.
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