The number of commercial bribery cases dealt with by Chinese courts rose to 4,406 in the first seven months, 8.2 percent more than the same period of last year, the Supreme People's Court (SPC) said on Saturday.

Xiong Xuanguo, vice president of the SPC, said 4,149 cases, or 94 percent of the total, involved civil servants, 6.3 percent more year on year.

"China will continue to target government officials who take advantage of their posts to collude with companies for illegal profits," Xiong said.

Commercial briberies featuring corporate wrong-doings rose 37.3 percent and cases relating to individual employees of companies jumped by 52.1 percent in the first seven months this year.

A total of 31,119 commercial bribery cases were dealt with in China in the past two years before August 2007, with 7.079 billion yuan (about US$943.8 million) involved, said Li Yufu, deputy director of the leading group on anti-commercial bribery under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

The most notorious "big fish" caught in the anti-commercial bribery fight was Wang Youjie, former deputy director of the Standing Committee of Henan Provincial People's Congress, the local parliament.

He was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for receiving bribes worth 6.34 million yuan and possessing 8.9 million yuan worth of property he was unable to account for.

Hu Xing, former deputy director of Yunnan Provincial Transport Department, was given life imprisonment for abusing his authority of city construction planning, real estate development and expressway project approval to take more than 40 million yuan in bribes.

Many other cases involved company bosses, bank directors and hospital presidents.

Li Yufu, also vice-minister of supervision, said China will also step up efforts in punishing bribers in accordance with the law while showing no tolerance toward government officials taking bribes.

He pledged that China will strengthen cooperation with other countries to bust multinationals who are engaged in the rising number of commercial briberies in China, as well as Chinese nationals who fled abroad after they committed this crime.

(Xinhua News Agency September 29, 2007)