Chongqing Municipality was urged Saturday to
recover resettlement funds misappropriated during the country's
massive Three Gorges Project as rapidly as
possible.
"Local authorities must recover the money before the end of
March, or else the officials concerned will be held responsible,"
Xia Kailiang, director of the Supervision Bureau with the Committee
for Construction of Three Gorges Project under the State Council,
told a meeting held in Yichang of central China's Hubei Province on
Saturday.
China's National Audit Office (NAO) reported that 272 million
yuan (US$34.8 million) of funds allocated for the resettlement of
residents displaced by the Three Gorges project in 2004 and 2005
were misappropriated by local authorities in Hubei Province and
southwestern Chongqing Municipality.
The money was used to open local government-run businesses, pay
off the debts of other local departments, pay salaries in
administrative departments, build more office buildings and houses
for people unrelated to the resettlement project, or pay off bank
loans, according to the NAO.
Auditors also found that local authorities fraudulently claimed
an additional 16.94 million yuan between 2004 and 2005, for example
to pay non-existent workers. Some construction enterprises were
found to have raised the cost of resettlement projects
unnecessarily.
The central government allocated 9.6 billion yuan in
resettlement funds in 2004 and 2005.
The NAO audited the use of the resettlement funds in 10 Hubei
and Chongqing counties and districts in 2006. Since the auditing
process only covered certain regions and a restricted time period,
the real total of misappropriated funds may be higher.
To date, Hubei has recovered all 63.85 million yuan of misused
money, while Chongqing still has 46.9 million yuan to find, Xia
told Saturday's meeting.
A total of 1.4 million people have had to be relocated to make
way for the Three Gorges Project on the middle reaches of the
Yangtze, the longest river in China.
The majority of people have been relocated to other places in
Chongqing and Hubei while others have resettled in eastern and
southern provinces.
Launched in 1993 at an estimated cost of 180 billion yuan (about
US$22.5 billion), the Three Gorges Project, the world's largest
hydro-electric project, will have 26 generators able to generate
84.7 billion kwh of electricity annually.
(Xinhua News Agency February 11, 2007)