China's drug watchdog has banned its employees from owning shares in pharmaceutical companies as part of an ongoing anti-corruption campaign which has unearthed a host of scandals.

"Staff members of the drug administration and their affiliated units should not own equity shares in pharmaceutical companies unless they leave their posts," said Shao Mingli, director of the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), on Tuesday.

"This kind of wrongdoing in the past should be corrected and those who violate the rules in the future will be sacked," he said at an inside meeting of the administration.

The SFDA also ruled that a timetable should be worked out by its local branches to sever remaining ties with drugs companies to which they were once affiliated for commercial purposes.

China is undergoing a thorough reform of its pharmaceutical industry following a bribery investigation into its top drug safety official Zheng Xiaoyu and a number of deaths last year linked to shoddy medicines.

Last November, one of Zheng Xiaoyu's directors at the SFDA, Hao Heping, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for taking bribes and Cao Wenzhuang, former director of the drug registration department of the SFDA, was detained in Jan. 2006 on suspicion of bribery.

China's pharmaceutical industry has become a target of rising public dissatisfaction, with fake and unsafe medicines becoming more widespread and hospitals selling more unnecessary drugs to patients to pad out their income.

(Xinhua News Agency February 28, 2007)