China casts spotlight on its street-lamp officials’ corrupt practices
Bureaucrats inflate the costs of public lighting – paid for using taxpayers’ money – while raking in big bucks from advertisements displayed on them
An increasing number of corruption cases involving China’s street-lamp management officials have come to light of late, with the latest being a Hangzhou accountant who allegedly embezzled almost 6 million yuan (HK$7.54 million) of public-lighting funds.
More than 30 such officials from Hebei, Jiangsu, Jiangxi and Zhejiang provinces have been investigated for graft over the past two years, the Beijing Youth Daily reports.
“What lies behind these inconspicuous street lamps are in fact enormous amounts of investment totalling tens or even hundreds of millions of yuan,” a street-lamp industry insider told the newspaper on condition of anonymity.
Public funds were being used to pay for lamp maintenance and electricity bills, while income raked in from advertisements displayed on street light boxes were huge, the businessman said. He had to bribe officials every step of the way in his business, from lamp designs and project bidding to lamp assessments and maintenance, he added.
In Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, Xu Yueming, an accountant with the electricity bureau’s lamp-management department, has been charged with embezzling electricity bills totalling 5.88 million.
Xu’s colleague Wu Shuiling, was sentenced to ten-and-a-half years’ jail after a court found that Wu took 1.16 million yuan of bribes and a 10,000-yuan gold bar from a local light decoration firm in exchange for letting it win urban lighting projects from 2005 to 2013.
