THE Chinese official who signed off on George Osborne’s deal for Beijing to invest in UK nuclear power stations has been brought down in the country’s anti-corruption purge.
Xu Yongsheng could face a death sentence after prosecutors charged him with accepting close to £600,000 in bribes from eight Chinese state-owned companies between 2008 and 2012 in exchange for licences to build power plants.
He pleaded not guilty at a one-day hearing behind closed doors in Beijing on February 23, claiming he had been tortured into making a false confession.
Xu, 50, was the head of China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) when he signed the memorandum of understanding with Lord Deighton, then the commercial secretary to the Treasury, under the approving gaze of the chancellor at a ceremony in October 2013.
It laid out the “strategic framework” for nuclear collaboration between Britain and China, paving the way for the China General Nuclear Power Company (CGN) to invest in the troubled £18bn power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset.
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But Xu had vanished from public view by the time the deal was finalised during a state visit to Britain by President Xi Jinping last year.
It has since emerged that he was enduring months of sleep deprivation, death threats and physical abuse during more than 100 interrogations at the hands of prosecutors and police, according to his testimony at the trial.
One female investigator threatened to cut off his head and “place it under the Communist party flag” and another said he deserved the death penalty because one local official had been executed merely for receiving a leather overcoat.
A detailed account of the hearing was published by the leading Chinese business magazine Caixin, which cited a person who was present in court to hear the statements by Xu and his lawyer, Xu Ping.
The lawyer said his client had been interrogated more than 100 times — 27 of them at an unidentified location with no surveillance cameras to record what went on.
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Xu himself wept as he told the court of the death threats, saying interrogators forced him to sit in a special chair for so long his buttocks bled.
His statement corroborated reports from human rights groups that prisoners in China are often locked into excruciating “tiger chairs” to intensify the pressure to confess.
Xu said he broke after the interrogators threatened to detain his wife, which would have left their teenage son to fend for himself.
“This threat alone was enough to force me to succumb,” he said, according to the Caixin magazine source. “I later admitted to their accusation that I took money to help China Datang Corporation get a licence to build a power plant in Zhuzhou, Hunan province.”
China Datang is a huge power company whose vice-president is Li Xiaolin, the daughter of Li Peng, China’s hardline prime minister at the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
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Three firms identified in the court documents — Datang, China Huaneng Group and China Guodian Corporation — are leading players in the Chinese nuclear industry and are crucial to its export drive.
Prosecutors alleged bribery and corruption were rife in the licensing processes through which the firms got permits to build nuclear and conventional power plants.
Xu had been promoted to be head of the NEA after his predecessor, Liu Tienan, was removed. Liu was later sentenced to life in prison for accepting more than £3.5m in bribes between 2002 and 2012.
Only partial details of the case against Xu were revealed in the Caixin report and it was unclear why China’s censors allowed it to be published.
The state media have been utilised to spotlight corrupt officials brought down by an anti-graft campaign since Xi took power in 2012.
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The propaganda is aimed at the Chinese public, but officials may not have calculated that it also shines an unflattering light on standards of corporate governance and regulatory processes in China’s nuclear industry.
It will heighten concerns in the West about allowing giant state-controlled Chinese firms into the nuclear power business even as governments compete for investment from Beijing.
So far China’s CGN has acted only as a joint investor with EDF of France in Hinkley Point, which is intended to supply 7% of Britain’s electricity.
The project faces delays: EDF has financial problems and has to support the loss-making French nuclear reactor maker, Areva, making the Chinese stake of 33.5% in the plant even more important. Power generation may not start until 2025.
At a meeting last week, David Cameron and François Hollande, the French president, called the deal “a pillar of the bilateral relationship”.
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China’s nuclear ambitions in Britain go beyond Somerset. In the next phase, CGN aims to build new reactors to a Chinese design at Bradwell, in Essex. No verdict in the Xu case has been announced.