By Xinhua
Beijing : A defendant in China’s largest work injury claim was jailed for refusing to carry out the court’s order to pay compensation.
The Taishun County People’s Court in eastern China’s Zhejiang province sentenced Thursday Wang Yunfu to three years’ imprisonment for his “deliberate failure to fulfil court’s order”.
Wang was among the defendants sued in 2001 by a group of 148 farmers, mostly from Taishun County, for an unprecedented damage compensation of 208 million yuan (about $28.8 million) for the lung disease they said they developed when working as tunnel diggers in 1993.
According to the farmers, they were employed by the defendants in 1993 to dig the Wujialiang Tunnel on the highway linking Shenyang and Benxi cities, both in northeast China’s Liaoning Province.
The companies which employed them included Taishun County Tunnel Engineering Company, Taishun County Local Civil Engineering Company, the transport of the Liaoning provincial government, as well as several individuals.
Nine of the farmers who worked in the tunnel had died of lunch disease.