Hubei Province and the Chongqing Municipality were urged to step up supervision on use of resettlement funds in China's Three Gorges Project on Sunday.

"Measures should be taken to avoid any form of misappropriation of the funds, and every misused fund should be coughed up," said He Wenbin, director of the Supervision Bureau with the Committee for Construction of Three Gorges Project under the State Council.

By Sunday, all the 63.85 million yuan (US$7.98 million) of misused resettlement funds in Hubei has been recovered, about 96.7 percent misused funds in Chongqing has been recovered, according to He.

China's National Audit Office (NAO) reported that 272 million yuan (US$34.8 million) of funds allocated for the resettlement of residents displaced by the Three Gorges project in2004 and 2005 were misappropriated by local authorities in Hubei Province and southwestern Chongqing Municipality.

The money was used to open local government-run businesses, payoff the debts of other local departments, pay salaries in administrative departments, build more office buildings and houses for people unrelated to the resettlement project, or pay off bank loans, according to the NAO.

The central government has allocated 54.4 billion yuan (US$6.8 billion) as resettlement funds by the end of 2006.

A supervision system has been set up, in which departments from the provincial, township and county levels have audited for 49.6 billion yuan (US$6.2 billion).

Launched in 1993, the Three Gorges Project is massive as a total of 1.4 million people have had to be relocated. The majority of people have been relocated to other places in Chongqing and Hubei while others have resettled in eastern and southern provinces.

(CRI February 12, 2007)