A provincial legislator from central China's Hunan Province has been taken into custody on bribery charges, the Hunan Daily based in Changsha, the provincial capital, reported on Wednesday.

Liu Chunyou, 53, member of the Tenth Provincial People's Congress of Hunan, or the provincial legislature, was detained at the approval of the Fourth Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Tenth Provincial People's Congress.

The provincial prosecution department said Liu, also deputy secretary of the Xintian County (Hunan) Committee of the Communist Party of China and director of the Xintian Cigarette Factory, manipulated his power as factory chief to approve tobacco buying deals totaling 20 million yuan (US$2.4 million) with a supplier surnamed Yang between 1996 and 1997.

In return, in 1997, the supplier gave a bankbook of 600,000 yuan (US$72,000) to Liu Jianshi, son of Liu Chunyou, who accepted the bribe and told his son to change the money in demand deposit into fixed deposit, according to the prosecution department.

The department was also probing into other bribery offenses that Liu was suspected of having committed, according to the newspaper.

 
(Xinhua News Agency August 2, 2003)