A one-time contender for China’s presidency, Sun Zhengcai, was sentenced to life in prison for accepting over 170 million yuan ($27 million) in bribes.
Authorities intend to confiscate Sun’s personal property and retrieve his “illegal gains and relevant yields,” the official Xinhua News Agency said on Tuesday, citing a verdict from Tianjin No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court. The ruling makes Sun the fourth former member of the Communist Party’s Politburo jailed for life under President Xi Jinping.
Prosecutions of such senior-ranking officials are usually carefully choreographed affairs, and state television showed footage of Sun confessing during a one-day trial last month. “This is the outcome of my own deeds and I deserve all of this. I sincerely confess my…
