WUHAN -- Fan Yifei, a former vice governor of the People's Bank of China, was sentenced to death, with a two-year reprieve, for taking a huge amount of bribes.

The sentence was handed down by a court in Huanggang, Central China's Hubei province, on Thursday.

The court ruling said that after the two-year reprieve period expires and the penalty is commuted to life imprisonment in accordance with the law, no further commutation or parole will be allowed.

Fan was convicted of illegally accepting bribes worth over 386 million yuan ($54.6 million), either by himself or via other people.

Fan was found to have used his several influential positions in the financial sector to benefit others in obtaining loans, financing, project contracts and career changes between 1993 and 2022, according to a court statement.

The court ruled that Fan had "accepted an exceptionally large amount of bribes, with extremely severe criminal circumstances and a particularly negative social impact."

He has been granted clemency from an immediate death penalty in light of his voluntary disclosure of certain facts of the bribery cases that authorities had not yet discovered, his admittance of guilt, his expression of remorse, and the fact that he actively returned his illicit gains after being taken into custody, according to the court statement.