The first trial linked to a long-simmering scandal at the mainland's most profitable newspaper has opened in Guangzhou.
Deng Zequan, the former head of the Guangzhou Daily Group's capital construction department and general manager of its subsidiary property development company, has been charged with accepting bribes amounting to 460,000 yuan (HK$432,000), the Yangcheng Evening News reported yesterday. It is the first time the Guangzhou Daily scandal has been mentioned by mainland media.
The scandal has reached the highest levels of the Guangzhou Communist Party Committee and now threatens to spread to the Ministry of Propaganda in Beijing.
Li Yuanjiang, head of the committee's propaganda department and former president of the Guangzhou Daily Group, was detained by investigators on June 3. Guangzhou Daily editor He Xiangqin was detained in January along with Deng and Tao Jian, the former head of the newspaper's advertising department.
The report said Deng was detained by party investigators on January 7 and surrendered to state prosecutors a week later. Local government and media sources say that during her interrogations, editor He implicated senior officials at the Ministry of Propaganda in Beijing.
Deng, a 57-year-old native of Nanhai city in Guangdong, allegedly accepted so-called 'appreciation fees' from a cousin who ran a local construction material company that had earlier secured contracts worth 100 million yuan and 10 million yuan to build, respectively, a new printing facility and worker dormitories for the Guangzhou Daily Group. Besides its eponymous flagship paper, the group includes 13 other publications and booked advertising revenues of 1.3 billion yuan last year.
