A former senior Chinese energy executive was yesterday sentenced to 20 years in prison on corruption charges, the latest official to fall in a sweeping anti-graft campaign linked to the allies of disgraced security chief Zhou Yongkang.

Wang Yongchun was a deputy general manager at China National Petroleum Corp, the country's biggest oil company, until he became caught up in a graft probe last year.

CNPC, the parent of PetroChina, was a power base for domestic security chief Zhou, who was jailed for life for corruption in June.

Wang went on trial in July on charges of "holding a huge amount of property with unidentified sources" and "abuse of power by a staff member of a state-owned company."

"The property of defendant Wang Yongchun and his family obviously exceeded legal income, and the source of 42.5 million yuan (US$6.7 million) in assets could not be explained," an intermediate court in Xiangyang City in central China's Hubei Province, said in a statement.

President Xi Jinping has warned that rampant corruption threatens the survival of the ruling Communist Party and has waged a war on graft in the past three years that has felled scores of top officials in the Party, government, military and state-owned companies.

Several senior CNPC executives have already been put under investigation, including former Chairman Jiang Jiemin, who on Monday was sentenced to 16 years in prison for bribery and abuse of power.

The court said that under the direction of Jiang, Wang assisted in operations that led to "extremely large losses" to state interests.

Zhou, 72, is the most senior Chinese official to be ensnared in a graft scandal since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and many of his former colleagues have been caught up in the anti-graft campaign.

A court in north China's Tianjin yesterday opened the trial of another Zhou associate: former vice governor of south China's Hainan Province, Ji Wenlin.

Ji, whose criminal probe began last year, illicitly received more than 20.4 million yuan in assets and bribes between 2002 and 2013.

According to his official biography, Ji worked under Zhou when the latter was public security minister and Party boss of southwest China's Sichuan Province.

Another Zhou aide from Sichuan, Guo Yongxiang, was sentenced to 20 years in prison yesterday in a separate Hubei court for bribery and other crimes.

On Monday, former Zhou ally Li Chuncheng was sentenced by a court in Hubei to 13 years in prison for bribery and abuse of power.

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