File Photo: China's Former Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang. (Reuters Photo)
China sentenced a former high-ranking provincial official to 20 years in prison for corruption, a court said, the fourth ally of ex-security chief Zhou Yongkang punished this week.
Guo Yongxiang, once vice-governor of the southwestern province of Sichuan, accepted more than 43 million yuan ($6.8 million) in bribes, the Yichang Intermediate People's Court said on a verified social media account.
Guo's "personal and family assets and expenditures clearly exceeded his and his family's legal income", it posted late Tuesday.
Guo was previously an aide to Zhou Yongkang, the ex-chief of China's domestic security apparatus and the highest-ranking Communist official to have fallen in President Xi Jinping's much-publicised anti-graft campaign.
The investigation into Guo was an early sign that China was targeting Zhou in a crackdown that some have described as a political purge.
Sichuan was one of Zhou's powerbases, as was China's oil industry, in which Guo worked for 26 years.
Three other former oil men with ties to the security czar have been jailed this week, including Jiang Jiemin, the ex-head of the body that oversees China's top state-owned companies, who was sentenced to 16 years.