Related: China punishes 416 civil servants amid campaign against commercial bribery

    BEIJING, July 31 (Xinhua) -- China tackled 6,972 commercial bribery cases from August 2005 to June 2006, involving 1.963 billion yuan of illicit money.

    The information was released on Monday by Li Yufu, deputy director of the leading group on combating commercial bribery under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

    He said bribery cases mainly existed in fields of construction, land acquisition, ownership transfer of state-owned enterprises, government procurement, medicine purchasing and selling, resources development, bank lending, trade in securities and futures, commercial insurance, publishing industry, telecommunication industry, electric power industry, sports industry and environmental protection.

    He said among the nearly 7,000 commercial bribery cases, 1,603 cases were related to state workers, taking up to 23 percent of the total, with 508 million yuan of illicit money involved.

    He said commercial bribery is still rampant in certain industries. Departments concerned should intensify their efforts to bust a batch of major commercial bribery cases and severely punished the criminals, so as to curb the breading and spreading of commercial bribery. Enditem