The Guangdong People's Procuratorate blamed negligent government officials for causing the deaths of 1,075 people, injuring 139 people and allowing 4.6 billion yuan ($692 million) in direct economic losses over a five-year period, Guangdong-based Nanfang Daily reported Tuesday.
The procuratorate said losses from cases involving dereliction of duty and other violations created 17 times more in losses than corruption cases. Bureaucrats in the fields of mineral resources and State assets management were behind most of the illegal activities, the report said.
In the past five years, procuratorate departments in Guangdong have investigated 1,476 cases involving 1,614 people that had connections to 108 government officials above the county level.
The procuratorate departments helped retrieve 1.1 billion yuan ($165 million) in economic losses, the report said.
An official of the urban construction bureau in Yangjiang, Guangdong, neglected his duty and arbitrarily decided to look the other way when he learned about illegally constructed buildings. He imposed a partial fine on the developers that resulted in the loss of 30 million yuan ($4.5 million), the Legal Daily reported in August.
"Finding clues and collecting evidence are among the main challenges," said Wen Yaoxun, deputy director of the Anti-malpractice Bureau at the provincial procuratorate.
Du Yan, director of the bureau, said that procuratorial departments often learn about malpractice from media reports. "We hope to strengthen cooperation with the media in the future to improve supervision over malpractice cases," said Du.
(By Ge Lili)
