A senior official of a Chinese state-owned enterprise in charge of building a railway in East Africa is to appear in court on bribery charges on Friday, according to Kenyan authorities.
The senior official, identified as Liu Yabin, and another liaison officer, Tang Ju, from the China Road and Bridge Corporation were arrested on suspicion of offering bribes to Kenyan highways authority officials in an effort to avoid charges for overloaded trucks, according to the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission in Kenya.
Liu is accused of offering 30,000 Kenyan Shillings (HK$2,170) and Tang of offering KS100,000 to the officials in return for waiving the charges on their trucks, which were overloaded with construction materials, last weekend.
China won the tender last year to build the US$3.8 billion railway line that will stretch from the Kenyan port city of Mombasa to Nairobi, and link to the capitals of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan.
The EACC, in charge of the sting operation with the highway officials, said Liu would appear in an anti-corruption court today and that Tang had appeared in court on Tuesday.