The former Communist Party boss of a scandal-ridden province in China’s northwest faced court on Monday, accused of taking the equivalent of tens of millions of US dollars in bribes. Zhao Zhengyong, the former party chief of Shaanxi province, went on trial in the northern municipality of Tianjin, for allegedly “taking advantage of his position to accept bribes from contractors and people who sought job promotions, personnel assignment and [favours] in the management of company business”, according to a court notice. In all, Zhao and his wife, who was not identified, took 426 million yuan (US$60 million) in bribes and had agreed to take another 291 million yuan, the notice said. State news agency Xinhua reported that a verdict would be handed down at a later date. Zhao’s trial came just two weeks after President Xi Jinping paid a high-profile visit to Shaanxi , telling cadres to learn a lesson from the corruption scandal in which Zhao had played a leading role. To underline the point, Xi visited the Qinling Mountains, ground zero of the scandal. The offences came to light in January last year when state broadcaster CCTV aired a programme in which Shaanxi officials confessed that they had ignored repeated orders from Xi since 2014 to clean up the illegal construction of hundreds of luxury villas built in a natural reserve in the mountains. The programme did not name Zhao but severely criticised a “key leader” of the Shaanxi party committee for not taking the issue seriously. Zhao was Shaanxi’s governor from June 2010 to December 2012 and promoted to party chief until he stepped down in March 2016. Within a week of the programme airing, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, China’s top anti-graft watchdog, announced that Zhao had been arrested . Zhao was expelled from the party in January this year and denounced by the CCDI as “two-faced”, “disloyal and disrespectful” . “He appeared to give no importance to the decisions and plans of the party’s Central Committee, and was politically irresponsible and half-hearted at work. He deceived the party repeatedly and resisted party inspection,” the CCDI said. Zhao was one of the biggest names to be taken down in Xi’s anti-graft campaign, which resulted in disciplinary action against 485,000 party members of various ranks in 2019. In all, 19,000 cases were handed to prosecutors.