Chinese general gives out Mercedes filled with gold
A senior member of the People’s Liberation Army is accused of handing out luxury cars stuffed with gold bars as part of a £3 billion corruption scheme
A Chinese general handed out Mercedes cars packed with gold bars as part of a £3 billion corruption racket, it was claimed this week, as Beijing continued to promote its crusade against thieving Communist Party officials.
Gu Junshan, a Lieutenant General from the People’s Liberation Army, was arrested in early 2012 and has not been seen in public since. He is suspected of involvement in a massive corruption scheme that allegedly involved the sale of positions with the military.
Earlier this year Chinese media described a 2013 police raid on the general’s mansion in Henan province in which four truck’s worth of luxury items were seized including a cellar of expensive wine and a pure gold statue of Chairman Mao.
Further details of Gu’s alleged crimes emerged this week including claims he had been involved in a 30 billion yuan (£3.09bn) racket and had personally pocketed around 600 million yuan.
He distributed around 100kg of gold – worth close to £2.5 million at today’s prices – by packing Mercedes vehicles with gold bars and handing the keys to the recipient.
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The claims were published by China’s Phoenix Weekly magazine in a move that appeared designed to bolster the public impression that Beijing was winning its fight against corruption.
However, the report had been deleted by Tuesday morning indicating that Chinese censors may have thought the allegations risked stirring public anger at corrupt Communist Party officials rather than reducing it.
Beijing has spun the general’s downfall as a key victory in president Xi Jinping’s ongoing war on corruption, which began in late 2012 after he took power.
There are three sections on the fight against corruption in a recently published collection of Xi’s speeches that hit the headlines on Monday after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted giving copies to his colleagues.
“Moral purity is essential for Marxist parties to stay pure, and moral integrity is a fundamental trait for official to remain clean, honest and upright,” president Xi warns in one speech.
“Every official must bear the following in mind: “Do not try dipping into the public coffers because a thieving hand is bound to get caught.””
Critics accuse Beijing of using its anti-corruption drive as cover for a political purge of the president’s key rivals including former security chief Zhou Yongkang, whose formal arrest was announced last Friday.
A Transparency International ranking published earlier this month showed that, despite Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption efforts, China had fallen 20 positions to 100th place in terms of the perception of corruption. That placed it alongside Algeria and Suriname in the list of 175 countries.
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