China's former central food and drug chief, Zheng Xiaoyu, was sentenced to death by a Beijing court on Tuesday for graft and dereliction of duty, the state media reported. The 62-year-old Zheng was the first director of the State Administration and Drug Administration (SFDA) in 1998 until he was sacked in June 2005. His six-year tenure was riddled with corruption scandals, even involving his relatives and subordinates, and a series of food safety scares, Xinhua news agency said.
Zheng was under disciplinary investigation and expelled from the communist party in March this year before he went on trial from May 16 for taking more than 6.4 million yuan (RM2.9 million) in bribes and for dereliction of duty. Last November, his former secretary and ex-director of the SFDA medical devices department was jailed for 15 years also for bribery. The SFDA former drug registration director had been under investigation since January last year, Xinhua said.
The local media reported earlier that the probe into the scandal involved 31 people, including Zheng's wife, son and a number of drug companies. One pharmaceutical from south China's Hainan province was alleged to have bribed Zheng to approve 277 medicines, mostly high-profit antibiotics. Meanwhile, the government is drawing up regulations to recall unsafe and unapproved food products following a spate of food safety scares.
"All domestic and foreign food producers and distributors will be obliged to follow the system," Wu Jianping, director-general of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, told China Daily. Banned dyes in duck eggs, fish bred with cancer-causing feed and tainted milk powder mass food poisoning cases had raised questions of the standard of food security, he said. |