A former president of Shanghai's food giant Bright Dairy has been sentenced to six years behind bars for taking bribes of about 3.3 million yuan ($477,140), according to Minhang District People's Court.
Guo Benheng, 53, helped others, including his staff, to get contracts, arrange positions and offer promotions between 1999 and 2014, during which he was promoted from a production supervisor to president of the state-owned Shanghai Bright Dairy and Food Co, the court said.
Over the period, he received 2.75 million yuan and US$54,000 in cash and other gifts worth more than 200,000 yuan. They included a Montblanc pen, a Samsung fridge priced at 22,500 yuan, fossil woods worth 34,000 yuan, and travel packages for his family involving about 63,000 yuan.
He received one bribe worth more than 300,000 yuan with his brother, Guo Benli, 42, who used his contacts to help a packaging company in Harbin to get a contract. Guo Benli was sentenced to three and half years in November.
Guo Benheng was granted a lighter sentence because he confessed his crime and had returned some of the bribes.
He was sentenced to six years imprisonment and fined 600,000 yuan.
Guo should have resigned from his position in April, but he quit the job in June 2015, about a month after the city's discipline inspection commission announced a graft investigation against him.
Police detained him in August 2015, and prosecutors filed charges against him last June.
Another former executive, Wang Zongnan, who resigned in 2013 to end his seven-year term at the age of 58, was detained in July 2014 for graft.
In August 2015, he was sentenced to 18 years for bribery and embezzlement, totaling almost 200 million yuan between 2001 and 2006, when he led local Lianhua Supermarket Holdings Co and subsidiaries.
