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Beijing: A Chinese court on Friday sentenced former Shanghai Communist Party boss Chen Liangyu to 18 years in prison on corruption charges, his lawyer said, the most senior official jailed for graft in a decade.
The No. 2 Intermediate People's Court in the northern port city of Tianjin found Chen guilty of taking bribes and abuse of power. He has been held since 2006.
Chen, 61, was mired in a snowballing scandal over the misuse of social security funds in China's financial hub. More than a dozen senior officials and businessmen have been implicated.
Chen, who then lost his seat in the Communist Party's decision-making Politburo, is the highest-ranking Chinese official imprisoned for corruption in a decade.
One of Chen's lawyers, Gao Zicheng, said that the court had accepted part of the defence his team made on Chen's behalf and cleared Chen of a charge of dereliction of duty.
The court also confiscated 300,000 yuan (Dh157,288) of Chen's personal property, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Gao said he would discuss with Chen whether to appeal against the sentence. Chen has ten days to appeal.
The Shanghai scandal broke in 2006 and involved the misappropriation of more than 30 billion yuan (Dh15,72 billion) of the city's social security funds.
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