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High-profile Chinese army general Fang Fenghui sent to prison for life for corruption
General Fang Fenghui was found guilty of accepting and offering bribes, as well as holding a huge amount of property from unidentified sources, according to the court ruling. He was also deprived of his political rights for life and had his personal properties confiscated.
A former top Chinese general has been sentenced to life in prison for corruption, state media has reported.
A military court announced this week that General Fang Fenghui, the high-profile former chief of joint staff of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), had taken bribes and amassed huge unaccounted wealth.
Fang was also a member of the powerful Central Military Commission (CMC), headed by President Xi Jinping.
Fang, 67, had accompanied President Xi in his first meeting with US President Donald Trump in 2017; the disgraced general had also met the visiting the Indian army chief General Dalbir Singh during his China tour in November 2016.
And in March 2017, a few months after Xi was announced as the “core” of the Communist Party of China, Fang coined the phrase “Central Military Commission (CMC) chairman responsibility system” and said this chain of command must be ensured.
Fang’s fortunes, however, tumbled soon after and in 2018, he was put under investigation.
Earlier this week, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
“Fang was found guilty of accepting and offering bribes, as well as holding a huge amount of property from unidentified sources, according to the court ruling. He was also deprived of his political rights for life and had his personal properties confiscated,” official news agency, Xinhua said in a report.
“The illicit money and properties confiscated will be turned over to the state coffers,” the report added.
Fang’s case was transferred to the military prosecution authority for suspected bribery in January 2018.
The same year, in October, he was expelled from the CPC, the PLA and stripped of his rank of general for “seriously violating discipline and law”.
At the time, the CMC’s statement on Fang was unusually harsh, even calling him duplicitous.
“Neither loyal nor honest to the CPC, Fang was found to have been duplicitous, disintegrated politically and grown greedy economically, severely damaging the Party’s cause and the image of the military,” a government statement had then said.
“Fang severely violated political discipline, the political code of conduct, the eight-point frugality code of the CPC Central Committee and the regulations and discipline of the military,” the statement read.
“He was suspected of offering and taking bribes and possessing a large amount of property from unidentified sources, which are ‘extremely serious violations’ involving a huge amount of assets and had caused an extremely bad influence,” the CMC said.
