A former lawmaker from the southern city of Dongguan denied charges of organizing prostitution when he appeared at the city’s Intermediate People’s Court yesterday.

Liang Yaohui, former deputy to the National People’s Congress and owner of the five-star Crown Prince Hotel, also denied destroying evidence related to activities at the hotel.

He was one of four people to deny the charges while 43 hotel employees pled guilty.

Prosecutors told the court that Liang’s alleged offenses were “extremely severe” and merited the death penalty or life in prison, according to a China News Service report.

The court heard that the hotel’s sauna center had made about 49 million yuan (US$7.9million) in profit in 2013 from organizing prostitution that included underage prostitutes.

Prosecutors said that two truckloads of vouchers and receipts had been destroyed following media exposure of the sex trade.

The sauna center’s manager, who was not named in the CNS report, told the court that Liang had asked some employees and prostitutes who appeared on a TV program to confess. The court didn’t announce a verdict yesterday.

In February last year, a CCTV undercover report alleged that Liang’s hotel was involved in the sex trade together with other hotels and entertainment venues in Dongguan

The program showed rooms where naked prostitutes were said to have danced behind two-way mirrors for clients to choose.

An initial police investigation found that the hotel, established in 1995, begun to offer sex services in 2004. It had 99 such rooms in the sauna center and about 100 prostitutes, according to a report on the People’s Daily website.

The CCTV program said that prostitution was rampant in Dongguan. It said the highly visible trade in sex included beauty contests where prostitutes wearing number tags paraded in front of prospective clients.

When the Ministry of Public Security was alerted just hours after the program was aired, it ordered a crackdown.

In a four-month operation, police detained 661 suspects. A total of 43 civil servants were punished for dereliction of duty or shielding the sex business. Of them, 14 were transferred to judicial organizations, according to the Supreme People’s Procuratorate.

Yan Xiaokang, vice mayor and police chief of Dongguan, was removed from his post on February 14, 2014.

Last Tuesday, Zou Wenqiang, former political commissar of the Guangdong Public Security Bureau, stood trial for allegedly accepting bribes of over 1.97 million yuan from 2005 to 2014 to shield prostitution in several hotels in Dongguan. He is awaiting a verdict.

Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)