Anti-gang campaign: Female bureau chief

The news that Tang Weidong had been transferred for review and prosecution caused quite a stir in Shiqiao County.

Within just a few days, Liu Cuifang, who sells vegetables at the Xiahe Town farmers' market, noticed that the unfamiliar faces who used to come to her stall every few days to cause trouble had suddenly disappeared; Grandma Jiang said that the eggs laid by her speckled hen had been unusually large these past few days, and she held the warm eggs and told her neighbors that it was a good omen; Ding Dazhuang finally let the police into his home, and his wife sat on the edge of the bed holding their 100-day-old daughter, quietly listening to the police read out the victim's rights and obligations statement.

On the same day that Tang Weidong was detained in the detention center, a newly transferred section chief named Ma moved into his office. Ma was in his early forties and had been transferred from a neighboring county.

On his first day in office, Section Chief Ma left his office door wide open and had the cleaning lady move the potted green ivy left by Tang Weidong into the corridor, saying that the office needed to be aired out.

The potted green ivy basked in the sun in the corridor for a few days, and its leaves slowly turned from withered yellow back to dark green. The vines hung down along the edge of the pot and swayed gently in the breeze.

But Jiang Ruolan knew that Tang Weidong was just someone pushed out to take the fall in this chain of interests.

During the interrogation, he repeatedly said one sentence: "The entire mining management system is rotten, just to varying degrees."

When the task force was examining Tang Weidong's notebook, they found that it mentioned a person with the code name "Old Xu" or "Director Xu" many times.

One page even had a heading that read, "Director Xu instructed by phone: The reserve price for the third section of the Xiahe Town bidding should be filled in according to the lower limit of geological reserves to ensure that You Chuanfu wins the bid."

The frequency of calls between Director Xu and Tang Weidong increased dramatically in the two weeks leading up to the bidding for the mining rights in the third section of the Xiahe Town River. There were at least two calls a day, and each call lasted more than ten minutes.

During a supplementary interrogation, Tang Weidong later confessed that this Director Xu was Xu Houde, the deputy director of the Standing Committee of the People's Congress of Shiqiao County. In the first few years when Tang Weidong served as the head of the Mining Management Section, Xu Houde was the deputy county head of Shiqiao County in charge of land and resources. Tang Weidong's appointment as the head of the section was signed by Xu Houde himself.

After retiring from his position as deputy county head, Xu Houde was transferred to the position of deputy director of the county people's congress. It seemed like he had stepped down to the second line, but in reality, he moved to a safer position to continue to remotely control the personnel and approval of the mining management system.

The key personnel he cultivated in the mining management system are still in many key approval positions throughout the county, and Tang Weidong is just one of the most prominent ones.

Jiang Ruolan compiled Tang Weidong's confession about Xu Houde into a special report and personally went to the Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection's working group stationed in Yi'an.

After reading the report, Standing Committee Member Sun took off his reading glasses, tapped the table lightly with his fingertips, and remained silent for a while before speaking:

"We actually had leads on Xu Houde a long time ago. He's a veteran in the mining management system, having worked his way up from a township mining management office to deputy county head. He's been operating in Shiqiao County for over twenty years, overseeing several powerful departments including land, urban construction, transportation, and environmental protection. The leads on Tang Weidong's line were already included in the preliminary investigation six months ago. At that time, Pei Zongren's case had just ended, and several entries on the bribery list we found in his home pointed to the Shiqiao County mining management system, including one code name: 'Old Xu.' During the preliminary investigation, we discovered that several leads converged on Xu Houde—Tang Weidong, You Chuanfu's Fusheng Sand and Gravel Plant, and a building materials trading company under Xu Houde's son, Xu Honglei."

This company was registered in 2017, with its main business being "sand and gravel trading." However, the registered business scope and actual business scale are seriously inconsistent—the registered capital is only 500,000 yuan, yet it signed sand and gravel supply contracts worth nearly 10 million yuan in the year of its establishment. Its downstream buyers are all large-scale concrete mixing plants and construction companies in Shiqiao County and surrounding counties. And its upstream supplier is only one—Fusheng Sand and Gravel Plant.

Jiang Ruolan frowned slightly:

"Xu Honglei's company gets sand and gravel from Fusheng, whose behind-the-scenes boss is You Chuanfu, who is Tang Weidong's brother-in-law. So this is a complete chain of interest transfer—Xu Houde protects You Chuanfu in the approval process, Tang Weidong is responsible for execution, You Chuanfu is responsible for mining, and Xu Honglei is responsible for sales. It's a one-stop operation with a clear division of labor."

"Yes. But there's a link in this chain that was added later, namely Xu Honglei's trading company. It only appeared in 2017, while Tang Weidong issued the first mining license to You Chuanfu in 2014."

Xu Houde may have initially just been collecting money to do his bidding, but later he felt that simply collecting money wasn't enough, so he directly had his son get involved in downstream trading—the sand and gravel were sourced from Fusheng, and with the addition of a trading company's markup, the profits doubled and flowed into the Xu family's pockets. Moreover, this trading company had another clever use: it was the legal entity that issued invoices for the sand and gravel sales to downstream construction companies. All project payments passed through Xu Honglei's hands, and You Chuanfu's sand sourcing fees were packaged as "purchase costs," while the Xu family's profits were packaged as "trading margins."

Even if you investigate, you won't see anything unusual on the tickets. These fund flows were already under monitoring during the initial investigation, but to avoid affecting your breakthrough on Tang Weidong, we haven't taken action against Xu Houde yet. Now that Tang Weidong has spoken, and the evidence on Xu Honglei's line is almost solidified, go back and prepare for a joint operation.”

The joint operation by the Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection and the special task force is scheduled for three days later.

Over the next three days, Zhao Rui, along with several members of the Economic Investigation Team, thoroughly examined the accounts of Xu Honglei's building materials trading company from beginning to end.

The company's financial records show that from 2017 to 2022, Xu Honglei's trading company supplied more than 500,000 tons of sand and gravel to large-scale mixing plants, construction companies and government projects in Shiqiao County and the surrounding areas, with total sales revenue of nearly 60 million yuan.

However, its upstream procurement records show that almost all of its sand and gravel came from Fusheng Sand and Gravel Plant, with the purchase price per unit price being more than 20% lower than the average market price during the same period, while the downstream sales price was 15% to 20% higher than the average market price for a long time.

This small company, with a registered capital of only 500,000 yuan, made a fortune by profiting from the price difference thanks to this special relationship.

The investigation team also discovered that in 2019, Xu Honglei applied for a 2 million NTD business loan from Shiqiao County Rural Commercial Bank on the grounds of "business needs," with You Chuanfu as the guarantor.

The loan was not repaid on time after it matured in 2021. Instead, Fusheng Sand and Gravel Plant repaid all the principal and interest in one lump sum in the form of "repayment".

This is no longer a matter of "familial favors," but a blatant transfer of benefits—You Chuanfu used company money to repay Xu Honglei's bank loans in exchange for Xu Houde's continued protection of Fusheng Sand and Gravel Plant within the mining management system.

The night before Xu Houde was arrested, Jiang Ruolan and Standing Committee Member Sun held a coordination meeting.

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