A court in eastern China on Monday sentenced a former local official to death over taking bribes that authorities said amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars during a three-decade period.

Yang Youlin, a former economic development official in the Jiangsu Province capital of Nanjing on China's east coast, “illegally accepted property and assets" valued over 2.21 billion yuan ($325 million) from 1993 to 2023, the Changzhou Intermediate People’s Court said in a statement.

Yang was investigated as part of President Xi Jinping’s decade-long anti-corruption campaign that critics say has been used partly to remove his political rivals.

The bribes were paid in exchange for help with “undertaking projects, business operations, land grants and working capital,” the court said.

Yang was also convicted of embezzlement, offering bribes, misappropriation of public funds, abuse of power, and money laundering in one of the most dramatic corruption cases in recent years in terms of the sheer scale of the bribes involved.

Yang delivered a final statement in court that "expressed his guilt and remorse,” the court’s statement said. In the photos released by the court, a gray-haired Yang is wearing a dark jacket and standing between two uniformed police officers.

Public hearings for the case were held on two separate days in March and April, with more than 30 people attending, the court said.

The court statement said Yang's personal property would be confiscated and that authorities would try to recover the full amount he received in bribes.

Yang was the latest official sentenced to death over corruption in recent years.

In 2021, Lai Xiaomin, a party secretary of a state-owned company, was sentenced to death and executed over crimes of accepting bribes, embezzlement, and bigamy. In 2024, Li Jianping, a local official in Inner Mongolia, was executed after being found guilty of embezzlement and bribery.
 

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