Since the 1990s, Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province, has been a frequent and high-risk area for smuggling cases. In the meantime, although the State Council, the CPC Central Committee, constantly increased its anti-smuggling efforts. However, since 1996, smuggling activities in this area have not only been repeatedly banned, but have intensified and become a "smuggler’s paradise".
Among the leaders of criminal gangs, Chen Lisheng, known as the "king of car smuggling", has the deepest "water" and the most background, because his father is Chen Tongqing, the former secretary of Zhanjiang Municipal Committee. After Chen Lisheng graduated from Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1987, relying on Chen Tongqing’s power and influence, he first went to Hong Kong for fake formalities, became a Hong Kong resident, and then returned to Zhanjiang to set up a fake joint venture company, smuggling wildly, and earned hundreds of millions of dollars in a few years. At the beginning of 1996, Chen Lisheng and Deng Chong ‘an conspired with Li Shen and others to smuggle cars in Hong Kong and make profits from them. Deng Chong ‘an is responsible for organizing the supply of goods, Chen Lisheng is responsible for customs declaration in Hong Kong, export, shipping and picking up smuggled goods in Zhanjiang, and handing them over to Deng Chong ‘an, while Li Shen and Zhang Yi are responsible for clearing the relationship and customs declaration, and collecting customs clearance remuneration of HK$ 70,000-100,000 per container. What they often use in smuggling is to falsely report the name and quantity of the goods. For example, on December 29th, 1996, they shipped 68 cars to Zhanjiang Port in 12 containers, and declared them as auto parts. Only this sum evaded the tax payable of more than 13 million yuan. From May 1996 to April 1998, Deng Chongan participated in the smuggling of more than 2,900 car bodies and evaded the tax payable of 230 million yuan. Chen Lisheng participated in the smuggling of 1,905 car bodies, and smuggled more than 10,000 tons of diesel oil, and evaded the tax payable by 170 million yuan.
Chunhua Lin is the most nouveau riche among the leaders of criminal gangs. He was a salesman of a company in the 1980s, and within a few years he became the "king of oil smuggling" in Zhanjiang, accounting for more than 85% of the smuggled oil in Zhanjiang. In order to make huge profits, Chunhua Lin built his own wharf, which realized Jackie Chan’s matching of transportation, storage and sales of smuggled oil. The amount of refined oil smuggled by him was equivalent to 1/10 of China’s total import of gasoline and diesel in 1997.
Li Shen and Zhang Yi gangs are the most arrogant among the smuggling gangs in Zhanjiang. Li Shen’s car number plate in Zhanjiang is "11111", and these five "1s" show Li Shen’s arrogance and strength. At the beginning of 1996, Li Shen and Zhang Yi met Cao Xiukang, the Commissioner of Zhanjiang Customs, in Zhanjiang, and used Zhang Yi’s hue to pull Cao into the water.
Later, Li and Zhang Cheng set up "Zhongzheng Company", specializing in smuggling activities. They used various means to get through all the key positions of important law enforcement departments such as customs, frontier defense, commodity inspection and port affairs. After the smugglers’ cargo ship arrived at Zhanjiang port, Zhongzheng Company was fully responsible for customs declaration, and Li Shen and Zhang Yi shared the spoils and collected customs clearance fees. According to statistics, Zhongzheng Company has almost monopolized the customs declaration business of smugglers in Zhanjiang in the past two years. Li Shen is known as the "King of Customs Declaration", be worthy of the name. Li Yong, a subordinate of Li Shen, even started an auction house in partnership with the smuggling office and the public security frontier branch of Chikan District of the city. In this way, Li Shen’s gang formed a one-stop operation of smuggling, customs clearance and auction of confiscated smuggled goods.
To be fair, before 1996, despite the frequent smuggling activities in Zhanjiang, it did not reach the serious point of opening the country, and smugglers did not dare to do whatever they wanted in front of a relatively solid country.
Some municipal leading cadres headed by Chen Tongqing, secretary of Zhanjiang Municipal Party Committee, and the heads of key departments are seriously corrupt and act as umbrellas for smugglers. Some leading cadres are directly involved in smuggling, which is one of the reasons for the rampant smuggling activities in this area in the past two years.
Since Chen Tongqing was in charge of Zhanjiang in 1992, he has been pursuing pleasure, not enterprising, and gradually degenerated. He is known as the "blue ribbon" secretary because of his drinking and drinking. Over the years, he has also tried his best to use his power, selling officials and titles, and trading power and money. From October, 1994 to July, 1998, Chen Tongqing took advantage of his position to accept other people’s property, totaling more than RMB 1.1 million, by means of promotion, transfer and job arrangement. How can such a greedy party secretary seriously deploy and ask about smuggling activities?
In addition, in the activities of smuggling, Chen Tongqing is not hard-backed, and his son Chen Lisheng is known as the "king of smuggling". In recent years, Chen Tongqing has actually played the role of an umbrella for Chen Lisheng’s smuggling activities: in order to find an outlet for Chen Lisheng’s smuggled goods, Chen Tongqing has the cheek to call and make connections everywhere; In order to make his son have sufficient smuggling funds, he exerted influence and asked the Zhanjiang municipal government to come forward to guarantee a loan of 40 million Hong Kong dollars to Chen Lisheng’s company in an overseas bank.
"fish begins to stink at the head", under the influence of Chen Tongqing, some government officials in Zhanjiang have also joined the "get rich quick" smuggling crime. Yang Quqing, the former vice mayor, participated in smuggling, and he personally got 400,000 yuan in stolen money. During his tenure, he also accepted a bribe of 540,000 yuan from Li Shen; Binglin Zheng, director of the Municipal Anti-smuggling Office, personally coordinated the privatization and accepted the bribe of Li Shen’s partner Li Yong with peace of mind; Xiashan district State Taxation Bureau and smuggler Chunhua Lin set up a company in partnership, providing them with false VAT invoices, so that smuggled oil can be legally sold.
As we all know, customs, frontier defense, public security, commodity inspection, port affairs and other administrative law enforcement departments are all guardians of the country to ensure the normal import and export trade. They jointly guard the Great Economic Wall, and any department with loopholes will bring endless disasters to the country. Facts have proved that the weakness of law enforcement and supervision departments, and even collusion with smugglers, is another reason for the proliferation of smuggling in Zhanjiang.
Cao Xiukang, Commissioner of Zhanjiang Customs, was transferred from the General Administration of Customs to Zhanjiang Customs in August 1995. At the beginning of 1996, I fell at Zhang Yi’s pomegranate skirt. He gave Zhang Yi everything he wanted, listened to everything he said, and left party spirit and revolutionary principles behind him. Li Shen and Zhang Yi’s "Zhongzheng Company" was established less than 10 days ago, and Cao Xiukang agreed that it enjoyed the preferential policy of "putting it first and collecting it later". Over the past two years, "Zhongzheng Company" has smuggled nearly 100 times, but only two or three times were seized by Zhanjiang Customs. When the smuggled goods of "Zhongzheng Company" were seized by other customs, Cao Xiukang went to the door in person or pleaded by phone, and actively ran for Zhang Yi.
Due to the fall of Cao Xiukang, the heads of some key positions in Zhanjiang Customs have followed suit. For example, Zhu Xiangcheng, director of the investigation department, not only showed extra-legal kindness to smuggling gangs, but also revealed to them the deployment of the General Administration for smuggling.
While the customs is out of control, with the help of the smuggling gangs, some people from other law enforcement and supervision departments at Zhanjiang Port, such as frontier defense, public security, marine police, commodity inspection, port services, shipping and other important departments, have also accepted bribes for their own interests, let them go private, protect them, and escort the smugglers. In more than two years, Li Shen, Zhang Yi, Chunhua Lin and others paid bribes to public officials amounting to more than 7 million yuan. After the smuggled ships are seized by Zhanjiang Frontier Branch, they can be released smoothly as long as they pay a certain amount of sponsorship fee and give some extra benefits to Director Deng Ye and Political Commissar Chen En. After accepting bribes, the person in charge of the port and dock dared to let the smugglers take all the smuggled goods off the dock and sell them without any customs clearance certificate. After being bought, the salesman of the shipping company took the initiative to change the manifest and bill of lading for the smuggling gang, falsely reported the name and quantity, deceived the customs, evaded the license management and paid less taxes. A few people in the commodity inspection department issue false certificates for smuggled goods to make them legally sold in China.
As a result, the door of the Great Economic Wall is so open that it exists in name only.
The successful detection and investigation of the extra-large smuggling bribery case in Zhanjiang once again shows that no matter who he is, he will be severely punished as long as he ignores the party discipline and tries to break the law.
In recent years, Zhanjiang smugglers colluded with local public officials to engage in power and money transactions, which were sometimes reflected by local cadres and the masses.
At the beginning of September 1998, shortly after the Central Conference on Combating Smuggling, the masses exposed the rampant smuggling activities in Zhanjiang. The CPC Central Committee and leading comrades in the State Council attached great importance to this and decided that the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection would take the lead, and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the Ministry of Public Security and Guangdong Province would jointly form an on-site command leading group (hereinafter referred to as the leading group) to investigate and deal with the extraordinarily serious smuggling and bribery cases in Zhanjiang.
Immediately, discipline inspection, public security, procuratorial, customs, auditing and other departments formed a working group with the participation of relevant central and local departments, and a batch of case handlers went to Zhanjiang, and one investigation and evidence collection work started rapidly, which opened the prelude to the detection of extraordinarily serious cases.
On September 16, 1998, according to the arrangement of the leading group, the public security and procuratorial organs of Guangdong Province launched the first major action in this case, and arrested smugglers Chunhua Lin, Li Shen, Chen Lisheng, Zhang Yi, Li Yong and others in Shanghai, Guangxi, Guangdong and Zhanjiang respectively. At the same time, the procuratorial organs took compulsory measures against six people, including Cao Xiukang, former director of Zhanjiang Customs, and Deng Ye, former director of Zhanjiang Frontier Branch, which laid an important foundation for breaking through the whole case.
There are more than 300 people involved in the extra-large smuggling and bribery case in Zhanjiang, so it is extremely important to pay attention to the handling strategy. After the working group entered Zhanjiang, according to the actual situation, it adhered to the principle of proceeding from reality, and clearly focused on the leaders and backbones of gangs and leading cadres among law enforcement and supervision personnel who took bribes and colluded with smuggling groups; For most ordinary people who have made such mistakes, as long as they truthfully confess their problems to the organization and withdraw from illegal income, they will implement a lenient policy.
On October 8, 1998, Zhanjiang Customs held a general meeting of all cadres, and the leading group and the relevant responsible persons of Guangdong political and legal organs announced on the spot that they would honor the leniency and strictness policy. Zhan Rirong, deputy section chief of the Customs Container Supervision Department, voluntarily confessed the problem and actively returned the stolen goods. Although he received a large amount of bribes, he was still treated leniently and announced on the spot that he would be released on bail pending trial. Three other customs officers were found to have serious economic problems, concealed the situation and had a bad attitude, and were announced on the spot to be accepted according to law. As a result of the correct decision to crack down on the minority, educate the majority and get rid of the majority, more than 160 people have voluntarily confessed their problems and collected more than 16 million yuan, which fully won the time to handle cases and won the initiative.
Break the routine practice of case breakthrough and carry out classified investigation as a whole. In the past, cases were usually handled by one person, one case, one case and one case breakthrough. At the beginning of investigating this case, this traditional method was also used.
However, with the continuous expansion of the results, people discovered that the iceberg of Zhanjiang’s extraordinarily large smuggling and bribery case has just revealed a small corner. This case involves many party and government departments, many gangs and a wide range of people. If we still use the old method, we will get twice the result with half the effort and delay the fighter plane. Faced with the complicated situation, with the consent of the person in charge of the leading group, the working group decided decisively to break away from the routine and investigate a single smuggling activity. In order to go deep into Zhanjiang Customs, the "master gate" gathered by various smuggling gangs, it conducted a unified investigation and evidence collection according to the general categories of goods such as automobiles, steel products and refined oil products, which enabled the investigation and handling of the whole case to break through quickly and achieved twice the result with half the effort.
Zhanjiang’s extraordinarily serious smuggling and bribery case involved more than 300 people, reflecting all aspects of the problem. When investigating this case, the task force concentrated its fists, highlighted key points and concentrated on private investigations. Grasp the problem of smuggling and smuggling, and fight hard; As for other economic problems and abuse of power for personal gain exposed by smuggling, we should pay attention to collecting information and suspend the attack. It is precisely because the investigation and handling of the whole case has been carried out in an orderly, step-by-step and strategic manner that despite the large number of departments and personnel involved, there have been no problems, which is really rare.
The leaders of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council attached great importance to investigating and handling the extraordinarily serious smuggling and bribery case in Zhanjiang. The central leading comrades specifically instructed that the Zhanjiang smuggling case is the biggest and most serious smuggling case since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Thoroughly detecting and severely sentencing criminals according to law is of great significance to the party style, the national movement, the reorganization of economic order and the restoration of people’s trust. Please make persistent efforts, pursue hard and win the final victory.
The Guangdong Provincial Party Committee and the provincial government attach great importance to the investigation and handling of this case, regard it as a major event in the construction of a clean and honest government in Guangdong, give full support to the handling of cases in terms of manpower and material resources, and deploy a number of business backbones from the provincial discipline inspection and supervision, public security, procuratorial and other departments to enrich the handling team. The main responsible comrades of the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee often ask about the progress of the case, personally preside over the on-site office meeting, adjust the leadership of Zhanjiang, solve difficult problems, and provide financial support for the development of Zhanjiang.
It took more than seven months to investigate and deal with the extra-large smuggling and bribery case in Zhanjiang. During these more than 200 days and nights, the case handlers who fought in the front line suffered a lot and endured a lot of hard work with a high sense of responsibility and selfless dedication, and they just gnawed this "hard bone".
In order to fully and accurately grasp the situation and command and make decisions quickly and efficiently, a member of the Standing Committee of CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has been stuck in Guangdong Province for a long time and has been fighting with everyone, always insisting on front-line command. From October to December last year, at the critical stage of the case, the combatants fought hard day and night for three months and gave up all holidays. Everyone’s National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival were spent in the task force. Some gay wives were in a car accident, but they couldn’t get home to cook because they were involved in the case. The investigators of Guangdong Provincial Public Security Bureau who go out to arrest fugitives often go all the way around the clock, and sometimes they "stare" at the waiting point for dozens of hours. Among them, two investigators died gloriously while chasing fugitives in Hainan. On the Mid-Autumn Festival night last year, when thousands of families were reunited, the case handlers who stuck to the front line once wrote such a simple poem of self-encouragement: "On the Mid-Autumn Festival, people are affectionate, but this year is different. The lights of the leisurely family are bright, and the soldiers are evil in Jiangcheng. "
In April this year, after the case was brought to court by the procuratorate, due to the large number of people involved, according to the law, the Guangdong Provincial High Court appointed five intermediate courts in Guangzhou, Zhanjiang, Maoming, Shenzhen and Foshan to be responsible for the trial of the case respectively. Each hospital arranges the competent vice president as the presiding judge, and selects competent judges to form a collegiate bench to conduct trials in strict accordance with the law to ensure the quality of handling cases. Thanks to effective leadership and effective measures, the trial of Zhanjiang’s extraordinarily serious smuggling and bribery case fully embodies the principles of legality, openness and fairness, and the criminals involved have been severely punished by the law, and the people applauded.
In Zhanjiang, there are more than 200 cadres involved in this case. Their violations of law and discipline are shocking, and their corruption is thought-provoking:
-We must conscientiously carry out the education of "stressing study, politics and healthy atmosphere" and comprehensively strengthen the team building focusing on the construction of leading bodies.
The root cause of this extraordinarily serious smuggling case in Zhanjiang is a problem in the construction of leading bodies. This is the most profound lesson left by this case. Facts have shown that "stressing study, politics and righteousness" is not an empty slogan or an abstract concept, but a concrete and tangible requirement for leading bodies and leading cadres. In recent years, the central government has repeatedly applied to crack down on smuggling, but a few leading cadres in Zhanjiang City have been perfunctory, indulgent and even involved in smuggling activities, and they have lost their way in the face of right and wrong, resulting in this evil result today.
The leading cadres of the party hold the power entrusted by the people and play a decisive role in the success or failure of a place or a department. Chen Tongqing doesn’t talk about learning, politics and righteousness. He usually craves what is in the cup, which not only drinks his prestige, but also drinks the image of the party and the government. He developed from "anyone dares to drink wine" to "anyone dares to accept any kind of money", and then "anyone dares to use it" Pang Guoguang, the contractor who paid bribes to him, suddenly became the director of the Municipal Construction Committee.
-leading cadres should effectively manage their spouses, children and staff around them and make friends carefully.
One of the major problems exposed by the extraordinarily serious smuggling and bribery case in Zhanjiang is that many leading cadres involved in the case relaxed their self-demands and ideological vigilance on the issues of spouses, sons and daughters, and were gradually broken through the defense line and gradually embarked on the road of illegal crimes.
According to the masses, Chen Tongqing, former secretary of Zhanjiang Municipal Party Committee, came to visit local leading cadres with his son and relatives on the first day of his transfer to Zhanjiang. People say that on the surface, it was his son and relatives who saw Chen Tongqing off, but in fact it was the new secretary who paved the way for them to make a fortune in Zhanjiang in the future.
Cao Xiukang’s daughter was going to study abroad. He found Zhang Yi, and Zhang Yi asked Li Shen to help him complete the procedure of studying in Canada at his own expense, and Li Shen ‘an arranged a villa for his daughter to live in. Yang Quqing, the former vice mayor of Zhanjiang City, took advantage of his position to accept a bribe of 540,000 yuan from the smuggler Li Shen, in order to apply for his son’s residence permit in Hong Kong …
Cao Xiukang, who once listened to the smuggler Zhang Yi’s words and regarded him as a confidante, wrote in his Confession: "When those so-called friends frequently expressed their’ true feelings’ to me with money and things, I was timid and wavered, stretched out my sinful hands, and gradually fell into the mire of crime and became a sinner of the party and the people."
-We must strengthen the education, management and supervision of cadres and earnestly implement the responsibility system for building a clean and honest party style.
The case of smuggling and bribery in Zhanjiang once again proves the truth that "power without restriction will inevitably lead to corruption", and it also shows that our current system of supervision and management of cadres can not fully meet the needs of the anti-corruption struggle under the conditions of socialist market economy. Cao Xiukang did some work when he first arrived in Zhanjiang. Later, the General Administration of Customs heard some reflections about him, that is, he sent working groups to investigate and inspect many times. In recent years, he also audited Zhanjiang Customs every year, but failed to find problems in time. What is particularly shocking is that in this case, the "top leaders" of Zhanjiang Municipal Committee, Customs, Commodity Inspection, Frontier Defense, Port Affairs and other departments were all corrupted, and the supervision of Zhanjiang Port was out of control, and the country was opened and even a "black channel" where smugglers could freely enter and exit appeared. (Xinhua News Agency)