China has opened the corruption trial of a top official who headed the country's biggest petroleum company and later oversaw state-owned companies before being removed in September of 2013.
Jiang Jiemin appeared Monday in the Hanjiang Intermediate court in Hubei Province after being charged last month with accepting bribes, possessing a large number of assets from unidentified sources and abuse of power.
Jiang was chairman of state-run China National Petroleum Corporation, the parent company of PetroChina Limited, Asia's biggest oil producer, before being appointed in 2013 to the Cabinet body that oversees China's biggest state-run companies. He was fired from that position five months later, after he came under investigation.
A series of senior figures from China's oil industry have been detained in President Xi Jinping's two-year crackdown on corruption.
