The man at the centre of China’s biggest political scandal in decades has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for defection, abuse of power and corruption.
Wang Lijun, former vice-mayor and police chief of Chongqing, a city-province with a population equal to Canada’s and an area the size of Austria, was handed the sentence by a Chinese court in the western city of Chengdu on Monday morning.
The charges relate mostly to Wang’s flight in early February to the US consulate in Chengdu, about 300km away from his base in Chongqing, where he requested political asylum and told US diplomats that the wife of his boss, Chongqing Communist party secretary Bo Xilai, had murdered a British businessman.