Yu Zhifei, former chief of the Shanghai Formula One racing circuit and the man who introduced the sport to China in 2004, plans to appeal his four-year jail sentence for graft, his lawyer said on Monday.

Yu will lodge his appeal before January 13, the deadline for the ten-day appeal period under Chinese law, after his first verdict was announced on Thursday, Yu's lawyer Zhang Tiefeng told Xinhua.

Yu, 54, also former board chairman of Shanghai Shenhua Football Club, was found guilty of misappropriating 1.05 million yuan (nearly 144,000 U.S. dollars) in corporate funds to buy a house, according to the Wuhu City Intermediate People's Court in eastern Anhui Province.

The court sentenced Yu on Thursday to four years in jail. He was also fined 300,000 yuan (about 41,000 U.S. dollars).

The court heard Yu had illegally transferred 800,000 yuan from the Shanghai Shenhua Football Club in 1997 to a Shanghai real estate developer to pay for a 2.43-million yuan house. The amount of money was embezzled in the name of "consultation service fees".

In 1999, Yu misappropriated another 250,000 yuan from a Shenhua-funded international trade company to pay the remaining debt, claiming the money had been used on "public welfare advertisements" during that year's Shanghai chrysanthemum exhibition.

The court said that because Yu had confessed to some of his criminal actions, he had been handed a lighter sentence.

(Xinhua News Agency January 8, 2008)