China has punished more than 20 officials from poor inland provinces for spending extravagant amounts of money on new government buildings, state media said on Friday, in Beijing's latest anti-corruption push.
The departments named in the probe include one seat of county government, a city finance bureau and even a mine safety office, all of which put up buildings "in contravention of the rules", the official Xinhua news agency said. The punishments ranged from internal Communist Party warnings to sackings, it said. At least one official is being investigated by legal authorities for other, unnamed, problems.
In Puyang county in the poor, interior province of Henan, 18 officials were punished. The local government there spent more than 32 million yuan ($4.2 million) on a vast new office building, Xinhua reported.
Labour and Social Security officials in Puyang also misappropriated pension funds and subsidies for laid-off workers to build the bureau's office building and training centre, the report said. The government last month banned indoor gardens, multi-storey atriums and high-tech karaoke stages at government and party buildings. The move was partly a response to complaints about ostentatious public buildings, especially in the country's poorer inland regions.
Some local governments have embezzled poverty-alleviation and disaster-relief funds to put up luxurious offices and other facilities for themselves. Beijing is trying to crackdown on corruption, worried that it could threaten its own grip on power.