Disgraced rail boss Liu Zhijun to stand trial for 'very serious' graft
Liu Zhijun, who may have accepted up to 60 million yuan in bribes for high-speed-rail contracts, will seek leniency, lawyer says
Disgraced former railways minister Liu Zhijun will go on trial in Beijing tomorrow in one of the mainland's biggest corruption case in recent years.
Implying that Liu would be pleading guilty, Qian said he would plead for a "more lenient sentence" for "many reasons".
Qian, a partner at the East Associates Law firm and director of the Beijing Bar Association's criminal law committee, declined to elaborate on those or detail the amount of bribes Liu was alleged to have accepted.
Liu, who was fired in February 2011, oversaw a massive expansion of the mainland's high-speed rail network in the preceding decade. But that expansion also left massive debts and was tarnished by a high-speed train crash in Wenzhou in 2011 in which 40 people died. He was charged with corruption and abuse of power in April.
Liu will be the first minister-level official to be tried since the new government leadership was installed in March. President Xi Jinping , as Communist Party general secretary, has pledged an iron-fisted approach to tackling corruption within the ranks.