Tianjin official expelled from Party

• Source: Global Times
• [00:03 June 18 2009]
• Comments

By Li Xiaoshu

Pi Qiansheng during an interview in 2004. Photo: CNS

A senior official in Tianjin Municipality has been expelled from the Party for bringing “great losses” to the State through his abuse of power and corrupt actions, the Xinhua News Agency reported yesterday.

The CPC Central Committee approved the dismissal of Pi Qiansheng, 58, a former member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Tianjin Municipal Committee and director of the Tianjin New Coastal District (Binhai New Area), following an investigation by the CPC’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the report said.

Money that he had accumulated through illegal means was expropriated under the terms of the CPC Regulations on Party Discipline Sanctions and the Civil Servant Law, the report said.

Evidence of Pi’s crimes had been handed over to judicial departments, it said.

Pi had been involved in the administration of special economic and technological zones in Tianjin Municipality since 1984.

He was the director of the construction bureau, the land management bureau, the real estate bureau and the environmental bureau, Global People magazine said in a report published in February.

“Pi has a lot of ability, is very open-minded and expressive, but his concentrated power definitely created some problems,” the report quoted a source from Tianjin’s political circles as saying.

Pi’s family was involved in some of his crimes, the report said.

Police received information in August from his daughter, Pi Xiaomeng, who worked for Citibank in the United States.

Rumors claimed Pi’s wife, Huang Guifang, director of the Tianjin Management Center of Social Insurance Fund, secretly invested about 1 billion yuan ($147 million) from the fund in real estate and stocks.

A former official from the Tianjin Binhai New Area told Caijing magazine that Pi had trouble handling his personal relationships and that he had promoted some executives “inappropriately.”

Pi was also suspected of colluding with Huo Jinyi, the former chairman of the Beifang International Trust Corporation, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in June of last year for seizing State assets, the Chongqing Economic Times reported in December.

Pi allegedly supported Huo on a deal to lend 50 million yuan to a company in the Netherlands, the report said.