Civil servant gets 10 years for corruption
July 01st, 2012 | Global TimesA 32-year-old civil servant and his accomplice were each sentenced to 10 years in prison on corruption charges for embezzling more than 730,000 yuan ($114,902) from a government program for unemployed residents, local media reported Sunday.
The civil servant, whom prosecutors called Guo Wenzhong, used his position at the Qingpu District Human Resources and Social Security Bureau’s Employment Promotion Center to siphon money from a program that encouraged local companies to hire unemployed rural residents who had lost their farmland, according to the Qingpu District Procuratorate.
Under the program, qualified local companies could receive a one-time government grant of 1,000 yuan or 2,000 yuan for each person they hired, depending on his or her age, plus a 30 yuan monthly subsidy.
Guo was recently married and had hoped to purchase a new apartment that he couldn’t afford, so he hatched a plan to fabricate phony labor contracts and collect the subsidy through a company run by his accomplice, a man whom prosecutors called Yang Xiaoyi.
Yang was the general manager of Shanghai Junwei Investment Consulting Co Ltd, a local company that prosecutors said was poorly managed and burdened with high-interest loans. To pull off the scheme, Guo acquired a list of hundreds of qualified unemployed residents and fabricated a total of 334 fake contracts with the company, which then collected the grants from the government.
By Wang Lin