A township official gambled and lost 1.87 million yuan (233,800 U.S. dollars) he stole from a fund to help resettle people from the area flooded for China's Three Gorges Project on the Yangtze River.
Li Jun, 34, deputy relocation director for Sandouping township was sentenced to 14 years in prison after his conviction for embezzlement at Yiling District Court, in central China's Hubei Province, on Friday.
Li was in charge of the fund to help the township's 9,059 residents adjust to their relocation from November 2005 to December 2006.
The money he embezzled could have subsidized the township's entire population for four months if dispensed according to the central government rate of 50 yuan (6.12 U.S. dollars) per person per month.
He was the keeper of both the township relocation bank account and seals, which made it easy for him to embezzle money without any supervision, said the court.
In just one year, he lost all the money on an illegal lottery.
Police arrested him on Jan. 11 after the district audit bureau found the 1.87 million yuan missing from the accounts.
Launched in 1993 with an estimated cost of 180 billion yuan (22.5 billion U.S. dollars), the Three Gorges Project, the world's largest hydro-electric project, will have 26 generators with a combined capacity of 18.2 million kw generating 84.7 billion kwh of electricity annually.
The project required the relocation of 1.35 million people in the dam area, 220,000 more than the original resettlement plan.
The last group of more than 100,000 residents will be moved from the reservoir area by the end of next year.
The National Audit Office announced in January that 272 million yuan (34.8 million U.S. dollars) of the funds allocated to the resettlement of residents displaced by the Three Gorges Dam project in 2004 and 2005 had been misappropriated by local authorities.
Source: Xinhua
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