6 officials punished for gambling violations

Six officials have been punished for violations involving gambling, the country's top anti-corruption body announced on Tuesday.

Though officials are strictly prohibited from gambling by the law and regulations, it is rare for the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to make public details of those involved in such cases.

The six, all of them of middle or lower rank, include local Communist Party officials, government officials and prosecutors in a number of provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions.

Sheng Haomin, the owner of a machine tool factory in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, received a criminal penalty and was stripped of his Party membership. He organized mahjong games involving gambling on a number of occasions in March and April last year, and made a profit of 540,000 yuan ($87,000) from the betting, according to the CCDI.

The other five took part in gambling and received punishments ranging from warnings to removal from their posts.

"Gambling causes serious harm to society, and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China has on many occasions urged Party members and officials to keep away from it," the CCDI said in a statement posted on its website.

"These officials continued to violate disciplines even after the release of the eight-point rules and they should be punished severely," the statement said.

The eight-point rules were introduced by the new CPC leadership in 2012 to fight bureaucracy and formalism. They require officials to improve their approach to work and curb extravagance.

Between June last year and September, 7,162 officials across the country were punished for being involved in gambling, the Legal Daily reported.

In recent years, media reports of embezzlement by officials working for the government or State-owned companies to pay for gambling have attracted public attention.

Some experts have called for harsher punishments for those involved in gambling, as they believe it has become a major cause of corruption.

Gao Bo, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Legal Daily, "In many cases, gambling has become a channel for bribery to officials."