Official accused of four-year affair with TV news anchor allowed back to work as investigation gets under way
City government says that former cadre is free to work until investigation reaches its conclusion
A mid-level official in central China returned to work less than a week after he was dismissed from his post for having an extramarital affair with a local television news anchor, according to mainland media.
Jin Zeyin, former deputy secretary general of the Zhangjiajie municipal government in Hunan province, was accused of buying his mistress a luxury BMW sedan and giving her nearly 1 million yuan (HK$1.2 million) a year, the Shanghai-based news portal Thepaper.cn reports.
But not long after Jin was removed from his post for “problems with his private life”, the disgraced official was back working for the city government, unnamed sources told Thepaper.cn
The scandal came under the spotlight after the husband of the woman, surnamed Lu, reported his wife’s four-year extramarital affair with Jin in an online post in late April.
“Since 2012, Jin has given Lu a BMW sedan as a gift and nearly 1 million yuan a year to fund her lifestyle,” the post said.
Watch: video of Jin Zeyin with mistress
A video in the post, apparently shot by a hidden camera, shows three episodes of a middle-aged man walking about in his pyjamas, a woman putting on her clothes, and the man carrying the woman on his back in apparently the same flat. The report did not say how the husband obtained the video.
The post prompted police and the city’s Communist Party graft watchdog to launch an investigation and several days later Jin’s profile was removed from the official government website.
Jin and Lu worked in the same district of the city before Jin was promoted to the city government while the latter joint the city’s official TV station as a news presenter, according to Thepaper.cn.
Lu husband has made no further allegations online and has gone to ground for fear of reprisal. He said he resorted to posting the videos online after he passed them to the city government but received no reply from them.
The Zhangjiajie government told Thepaper.cn that as the investigation was still underway, Jin was allowed to work as a civil servant in the meantime.
