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Passports seized in war against corruption

Anti-graft inspectors are trying to keep suspects from fleeing to safety overseas

Anti-graft inspectors are confiscating suspects' passports to prevent them from fleeing abroad in the latest effort to curb widespread corruption among senior officials.

The travel documents of many senior officials have been seized by inspectors from the Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection, the Communist Party's anti-graft body. The seizures began during their recent unannounced visits to several provinces and cities.

The crackdown was reported in the latest issue of the China News Weekly magazine. The report said the inspectors would be sent to other provinces and cities nationwide, and possibly to Hong Kong and Macau, to investigate cadres with government administrative units and organisations.

In recent years, countries including the United States, Canada and Australia have become safe havens for corrupt mainland officials and their relatives. They often have more than one Chinese or foreign passport, and have been able to flee the country relatively easily.

In many cases reported in the mainland media, officials have taken millions of yuan embezzled on the mainland and used it in the west to buy luxurious mansions and cars or to pay for their children's education.

One high-profile case involved Yang Xiuzhu, former vice-mayor of Wenzhou and former deputy director of the construction department in Zhejiang province. She disappeared in April after being linked to a corruption scandal involving illegal land deals, and reportedly fled to the United States. She is understood to have purchased, through relatives in New York, a five-storey building in Manhattan.

In most cases, the mainland government can do little to bring such officials to justice because of the lack of extradition treaties with the countries they fled to. More than 4,000 officials who had been investigated for corruption were now overseas, having fled with more than US$5 billion from the mainland, said Banyuetan magazine, quoting statistics from 2001.

The former general manager of the Shaanxi Xian Electrical Machinery Company, Zhou Changqing, fled with a forged passport to Ecuador after losing more than 50 million yuan of the firm's money in Macau's casinos. He was eventually deported, then convicted and executed on the mainland.

Chan Kin-man, a sociology professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said government leaders recognised that rampant corruption in the administration could cause widespread discontent and threaten social stability.

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