More juicy details of disgraced railways minister Liu Zhijun and his bribers were exposed by mainland media at the weekend, as one report said he took massive kickbacks on lucrative high-speed rail projects.
The China Business Journal reported on Saturday that Liu, 58, took a personal cut of about 2.5 per cent from some of the mainland's multitrillion-yuan high-speed rail projects, which he awarded to favourite bribers, and that a special investigation team deployed to Shanxi to investigate his graft case is expected to finish collecting evidence before the annual National People's Congress session opens next month.
The report said Shanxi businesswoman Ding Shumiao, 55 - one of Liu's bribers, who was placed under investigation last month - had been selected to supply noise barriers along several high-speed rail lines from 2008, although the then nameless company could afford only a 48-square-metre office with rent under 600 yuan (HK$710) a month.
'Shanxi company Jinhande soon won the bid for China's first high-speed rail between Beijing and Tianjin together with the China CREC Railway Electrification Bureau Group after it had been sold to Ding in the same year, with a contract for 836 million yuan,' China Business Journal said.
It said Ding's company was also selected to supply noise barriers to many of the country's most important high-speed rail lines - including the one between Wuhan, Hubei, and Guangzhou; Guangzhou through Shenzhen to Hong Kong; and the one between Zhengzhou, Henan, and Xian, Shaanxi - in 2009. Railway authorities also increased investment on the projects' noise barriers by 15 per cent, from 530 billion yuan to 610 billion yuan.
'Before it was sold to Ding, the small Shanxi company recorded a sales volume of 2.85 million yuan in 2007 after it introduced noise barriers from Germany, but suddenly increased to 94 million yuan in 2008, the same year that it was sold to Ding,' the report said.
The business journal Caixin reported last week that Ding's company jointly owns the Zhibo Lucchini Railway Equipment Co, which supplies wheel sets for high-speed trains.
