One of China’s most senior ethnic Uygur officials will go on trial on corruption charges, official media reported on Tuesday. The investigation into Nur Bekri, a former chairman of Xinjiang region and head of the National Energy Administration (NEA), has been completed and prosecutors have decided that his case will soon be heard at Shenyang Intermediate People’s Court in the northeastern province of Liaoning, official news agency Xinhua reported. Bekri, 58, was sacked from his posts last year and has since been expelled from the Communist Party. Before he was named deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission and head of the NEA in 2014, Bekri had served as mayor of Urumqi and government chairman in the far western region. He was seen as a rising ethnic minority political star when he was promoted to the central government five years ago. Senior Chinese official who ‘lost faith in party and its ideals’ facing trial for corruption The Xinhua report said Bekri’s alleged crimes spanned two decades, starting from the days when he was one of the deputy party secretaries of Urumqi in 1998. A statement published by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate accused Bekri of “abusing his power and taking advantage of his position in accepting huge amounts of money and properties from others”. In March, the Central Commission for Discipline, top anti-corruption watchdog of the Communist Party, accused Bekri of involving family members in his alleged corruption by using them to solicit or accept bribes. The Commission said Bekri was “greedy” and lived a “lavish life” that violated Communist Party principles. He was also accused of trading power for sex. One source who had worked under Bekri in Xinjiang described him as “smart, charismatic and hard working”. He also said that Berki was a fluent speaker of both the Uygur language and Chinese because he studied at a school with a full Chinese curriculum when he was a teenager, which was not common in Xinjiang in the 1970s. Vice-governor of China’s Sichuan province Peng Yuxing ‘taken away in corruption investigation’ He passed the college entrance examination with top marks even though he only spent a year at high school, the source continued. He was considered a model student when he studied at Xinjiang University and had caught the eyes of local party leaders who groomed him for promotion. “He graduated from university two years ahead of his peers and that has helped him to climb up the political ladder,” the source said. Bekri is not the first NEA director to fall from grace. His predecessor, Liu Tienan, was dismissed in 2013 and sentenced to life in prison for bribery a year later.
