Three policemen in Shanghai's Zhabei and Baoshan districts have been involved in organized crime, Shanghai People's Procuratorate said yesterday.

Another two policemen are still being investigated.

The guilty three, one of them a deputy division chief in Zhabei Department of Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau, used their positions to protect illegal gambling dens, prosecutor Gao Yongchang said.

"They received bribes from criminal organizations and with their help the organizations expanded fast," he said.

The three have been convicted of bribery and dereliction of duty.

The information was released by the procuratorate in a news conference yesterday. No details were made available on the penalties the three convicted officials received.

Zou Chuanji, a procuratorate spokesperson, said crimes in recent years such as tax cheating, fraud and smuggling had seriously disrupted the country's "normal socialist market mechanism".

"They are often related to government employees' corruption or malpractice," he said. "The behavior encouraged crime and caused huge losses to the country and people."

A scandal last September in which more than 3 billion yuan (US$388 million) was siphoned from the city's social securities fund for investment has led to the sacking and arrests of a dozen senior officials including Shanghai former Party secretary Chen Liangyu, the top head to have rolled in Shanghai for many years.

In a massive campaign starting in August 2005, prosecutors' offices around the country commenced a relentless crackdown on dereliction of duty cases.

By the end of last December, Shanghai had racked up 27 such cases, estimated to have cost the country 87 million yuan (US$11.2 million) in financial losses.

In August, 2006, a trading company registered in the city's suburban Qingpu district was found to have faked VAT receipts and caused more than 5.33 million yuan (US$685,330) in losses.

And an employee of the district taxation bureau who was responsible for examining the company's tax books was sentenced two years imprisonment with a two-year suspension for failing to conduct his duty.

On May 10, 2004, an accident in a construction site in suburban Songjiang district resulted in two deaths and one serious injury.

Xu Qiang, an employee of the quality supervision center of the district construction administration was sentenced to four years in prison for failing to stop illegal construction, while also receiving more than 60,000 yuan (US$7,758) in bribes.

(China Daily March 28, 2007)