Eighty three officials of county head level or above have been penalized in the first ten months in south China's Guangdong Province for their involvement in commercial bribery, said provincial authorities on Friday.

Eighteen of them got jail terms, said Cao Xiaodong, director of the province's leading group for fighting commercial bribery.

The province cracked 405 commercial bribery cases involving 200 million yuan (29.2 million U.S. dollars) in the first ten months, Cao added.

The focus was on project construction, land use, property transactions, medicine procurement and sale, government purchase, financial affairs and investment, Cao said.