China indicts former Politburo member Ma Xingrui for bribery
State media said the bribery charges against the former Xinjiang party chief reach back to the late 1990s, and that he is the fourth Politburo member charged since Xi Jinping took power.
China has indicted Ma Xingrui, a former member of the Communist Party's Politburo and a former party chief of Xinjiang, on bribery charges, according to Reuters and to Chinese state media reports cited by the South China Morning Post.
State media reported the indictment on Thursday. The South China Morning Post said the bribery allegations against Ma date back to the late 1990s, a period of roughly a quarter of a century before the charges were announced.
Ma, 67, sat on the Politburo, the 24-member body that sits at the top of the party's decision-making structure. The South China Morning Post described him as among the most senior officials investigated in the anti-corruption campaign that President Xi Jinping has driven since taking power in late 2012, and said he is the fourth Politburo member to face corruption charges in that period.
Xinjiang is the western region where Ma served as party chief before the case against him surfaced. The reports did not say when he left that post or what he was doing immediately before the indictment.
Reuters, The Straits Times, Audacy and WKMG all led on the indictment in headlines published within hours of each other. None of those four accounts carried details of the alleged offences, the amount of money involved or where a trial would be held, and Chinese state media did not publish the text of the indictment in the reports the outlets drew on.
The reports did not name a court, give a date for arraignment, or say whether Ma has responded to the charges or retained lawyers. Under Chinese procedure, an indictment follows the conclusion of a party disciplinary investigation and the transfer of a case to prosecutors.
Ma's fall places him in a line of Politburo-level figures charged since 2012, a group the South China Morning Post put at four including Ma. The campaign has reached provincial governors, military officers and state energy executives over the same period.
Reuters reported the indictment as a news alert and did not carry further detail in the account available to this newspaper.
How the reports differ
The South China Morning Post carried specifics the other four outlets did not: that the alleged bribery dates to the late 1990s, that Ma is 67, that he was Xinjiang's party chief, and that he is the fourth Politburo member to face corruption charges since Xi Jinping took power in late 2012. Reuters, The Straits Times, Audacy and WKMG reported the indictment itself without those details. Reuters and The Straits Times used "indicts" in their headlines, while Audacy and WKMG described Ma as "charged with taking bribes". The South China Morning Post attributed its account to Chinese state media reporting on Thursday; the others did not say in their headlines where the news came from.
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