A September 22 Xinhua report disclosed the details
of the case of an official from southwest China's Guizhou
Province convicted last month for taking millions in bribes to
invest in coal mines.
Zhao Dawu, 50, former director of the coal bureau
in Zunyi County, was sentenced to life imprisonment on September 6.
According to the ruling of the Intermediate People's Court of Zunyi
City, Zhao's personal property of 2 million yuan, his investment of
2.67 million yuan in Sangshu Colliery, Huairen City and proceeds
from it, and a bribe of 500,000 yuan were all seized. The court
will continue to recover other bribes totaling 1.18 million
yuan.
????????????????????????Front
gate of the coal bureau in Zunyi County.
The court found that Zhao took up to 4.35 million
yuan in bribes from 2000 to 2004. Taking advantage of his position
and power, he helped many collieries that had been ordered to shut
down due to accidents or safety concerns to resume production.
Guizhou, south China's biggest coal producer,
accounts for one-twentieth of the country's coal output, but its
death toll from coal mine disasters is one-eighth the national
total. From January to August this year the province saw 373
colliery accidents that claimed the lives of 601 miners,
year-on-year increases of 12 and 30 respectively.
Though the head of a county's coal bureau is not a
high position, the coal production situation has made it an
extremely powerful and lucrative job in that region.
A gas explosion at Guanyan Colliery in Gaoping
Township of Zunyi on August 18, 1999 killed nine miners and
seriously injured two others. Following the blast the colliery was
ordered to stop production to improve working conditions.
In March 2000, the colliery's manager Tian
Weizhong, eager to resume production, gave a dinner for Zhao. A
couple of days later, mediated by Zhao, municipal and county
institutions checked the colliery and announced the ban lifted.
Zhao received 60,000 yuan from Tian.
????????????????????????????????????Bribes
taken by Zhao Dawu.
Also in 2000, the former Guizhou Provincial Coal
Department decided to permanently close Gaoping's Simianshan
Colliery as unsafe. Thanks to Zhao, only a year later the mine came
back to life and he was rewarded 44,000 yuan by the colliery's
manager Han Zhonggui.
In 2002, Zhao spent no more than 25,000 yuan to go
through the formalities for two Beijing businesspeople to run coal
mines in Zunyi, but collected 700,000 yuan from each of them.
Zhao used to be a driver on a farm in Zunyi, but
was gradually promoted until taking charge of the coal bureau in
May 1993, a position he held until being arrested in July 2004.
According to Wu Nian, chief procurator of Huichuan
District Procuratorate in Zunyi, investigators didn't find anything
valuable at Zhao's home, but discovered many criminal law books on
which he had made careful annotations.
Zhao never spoke rashly during questioning, said
the district procuratorate's Li Yuzhong, in charge of his case, and
investigators had to go out to collect evidence in the daytime and
interrogated him at night, forcing him to admit his guilt little by
little.
Wu said Zhao never used intermediaries to collect
bribes, and sometimes they were made in remote places with no
direct meeting. "This made evidence collection extremely
difficult."
The district procuratorate started investigating
Zhao last July, but the target date for its completion was
postponed twice, and eventually investigators were not able to
verify bribes of some 2 million yuan.
???????????Front
gate of the Huichuan District Procuratorate in Zunyi City.
Before the investigation, Zunyi County's discipline
commission and procuratorate had already received many letters and
calls against Zhao, but these were impeded by deep-rooted local
connections.
Investigators once put a recording pen in the
pocket of a briber to tape his conversation with Zhao as evidence,
but Zhao was tipped off and, pretending to get drunk, searched the
visitor and forcibly took away the recorder.
After a desperate but fruitless endeavor to bribe
district procuratorate investigators with 100,000 to 200,000 yuan
during interrogations, Zhao's connections proved ineffective at
last.
Xie Jiayong, a Guizhou Provincial Academy of Social
Sciences researcher, said it's time for the country to update its
antiquated coal policies as well as strengthen government
supervision.
Under current regulations, acquiring a mining
permit for several hundred thousand to 2 million yuan means
investors are eligible to tap several million to several ten
million tons of coal. After paying a "resource compensatory fee"
(less than one yuan per ton), they are then able to pocket the
extracted coal as their own.
As a result, in a short period of three to five
years, coal mining has produced a number of millionaires or even
billionaires at the expense of the country's coal resources as well
as the lives of miners.
(China.org.cn by Shao Da, October 8, 2005)
