Shandong Provincial Higher People's Court upheld the...

Shandong Provincial Higher People's Court upheld the death sentence against Wang Huaizhong, former vice-governor of Anhui Province, for taking bribes and owning many possessions he could not account for. Wang appealed to the provincial higher people's court after he was sentenced to death by the Intermediate People's Court of Jinan City. During the first trial on 29 December 2003, Wang denied all the allegations, but in the latest trial, he confessed to most of the crimes and argued for a light penalty on the grounds that the bribes he had taken were not big enough to justify a death penalty. Wang allegedly had taken bribes of 5.17m yuan (623,000 US dollars) from 1994 to 2001 and owned 4.8m yuan worth of possessions that he could not account for.