Beijing \u2013 <\/p>\n
Chinese courts sentenced two former soccer officials to prison terms of over a decade and imposed massive fines on Wednesday, part of an ongoing crackdown on graft in the sport.<\/p>\n
Liu Jun, the former head of China’s top professional soccer league, was given an 11-year prison term by a court in central Hubei province.<\/p>\n
Liu, the ex-boss of the Chinese Super League, was also fined 1.1 million yuan ($153,000) on charges of “bribery.”<\/p>\n
Reports of Liu’s fall from grace emerged nearly two years ago when he was placed under investigation for suspected corruption.<\/p>\n
And Wang Xiaoping, who previously headed the Chinese Football Association’s disciplinary committee, was handed a sentence of ten and a half years for bribery.<\/p>\n
The value of money or property obtained illegally by Wang has been recovered, the court said, adding that he had been slapped with an additional fine of 700,000 yuan ($98,000).<\/p>\n
The sentencing caps an investigation into Wang that was launched in early 2023.<\/p>\n
Chinese President Xi Jinping has waged a relentless campaign against corruption since coming to power over a decade ago.<\/p>\n
The drive has ensnared several high-profile figures involved in the country’s struggle to build a successful men’s national soccer team.<\/p>\n
In December, authorities imprisoned former Premier League star and men’s national coach Li Tie for 20 years on bribery charges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Beijing \u2013 Chinese courts sentenced two former soccer officials to prison terms of over a decade and imposed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33404,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,95,25302,25303,561,82,25304,9671],"class_list":["post-33403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-china","tag-corruption","tag-liu-jun","tag-soccer","tag-sports","tag-wang-xiaoping","tag-xi-jinping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}