HONG KONG: A Beijing court has sentenced China's former minister of railways Liu Zhijun to death, with a two-year reprieve, for bribery and abuse of power, China's state media reported on Monday, ending one of the country's highest-profile corruption cases in years.

Liu stood trial at Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court on June 9 for accepting GBP6m in bribes between 1986 and 2011 and using his position to help 11 people win promotions or lucrative contracts, according to the state newswire Xinhua. He had been formally accused in April.

The court also “deprived his political right for life and confiscated all his personal property”, the newswire reported. Suspended death sentences in China are usually commuted to life imprisonment.

The court's verdict will require Liu to spend at least 10 years in jail.

At the end of Liu's trial, which lasted three and a half hours, the former minister broke down in tears. While reading his final statement, Liu apologised for diverging from his goal of modernising the country's rail system and achieving the “Chinese dream”, a slogan adopted by China's newly anointed leader, Xi Jinping.

“Prosecutors said Liu had a very good attitude in confession and a strong desire to repent,” Xinhua reported.

Liu, the son of a farmer in landlocked Hubei province, began his career at the ministry of railways as a low-level office worker in the early 1970s and slowly ascended through the hierarchy until he was named minister in 2003.

Liu was a driving force behind the modernisation of China's rail system, a project that included building 10,000 miles of high-speed rail track by 2020 - with a budget of GBP170bn, one of the most expensive engineering feats in recent history.

Analysts say Liu's ruthless efficiency earned him the protection of higher party officials, allowing his corruption to go unchecked. He was placed under investigation in February 2011. “The big question, of course, every time there's a big corruption scandal, is why did it take so long?” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, an expert on Chinese politics at Hong Kong Baptist university.

“This demonstrates how weak the rule of law in China is, and how personal powers and personal connections can trump all kinds of legal rules.”

When a high-speed train crashed in the coastal city of Wenzhou in 2011, killing 40 people, public sentiment turned against the project - many said Chinese leaders had sacrificed too much for economic growth, leaving ordinary people behind.

Liu was singled out as one of the disaster's primary culprits, and state media began to highlight his misdeeds and gloss over his decades of achievement.

Analysts have linked Liu's trial to a high-profile frugality and anti-corruption campaign spearheaded by Xi, which aims to repair the party's image in the eyes of an increasingly disillusioned populace. Xi has vowed that the campaign will target both “tigers” and “flies”, referring to officials at all levels of the Communist party hierarchy.

Chinese media reports suggest the evidence laid out against Liu represented only a fraction of his malfeasance. His charges did not include assets recovered in related cases, including millions of pounds denominated in various currencies, including euros, US dollars and Hong Kong dollars.

The Beijing Times reported that investigations into Liu recovered 16 cars and more than 350 flats. He had 18 mistresses “including actresses, nurses and train stewards”, the state-run Global Times reported in 2011.

“It's really a matter of how much does this really prove that Xi Jinping is serious about anti-corruption, or whether it's really more about ostentatious corrupt practices,” said Steve Tsang, a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Nottingham.

“And in this case, there's not enough evidence that it’s about corruption itself, and not just ostentatious displays of corruption.”

By arrangement with the Guardian