HONG KONG — A Chinese court has sentenced the former chairman of a huge state-owned financial company to death after finding him guilty of bribery. It's a rare use of the most severe punishment in a long-running crackdown by Beijing on corruption.

Lai Xiaomin — who used to chair China Huarong Asset Management — was guilty of taking or seeking bribes totaling nearly 1.8 billion yuan ($277 million), a court in the port city of Tianjin said on Tuesday. Chinese state media reported in August that he pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing in the case.

The court said the bribes happened over the 10 years leading up to 2018, when Lai was investigated as part of a broader clampdown on the financial sector.

China's court system has a conviction rate of around 99 percent, according to legal observers, and corruption charges are often used to go after the Communist Party insiders who fall afoul of the leadership.

The scale of the crime is unprecedented. Not in the 72 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China has anyone been charged with taking bribes this large, according to an article written by Wang Xiumei, a former Supreme People's Court judge and law professor at Beijing Normal University, and published in the state-owned Legal Daily.

Authorities obviously took note of the historic nature of the crime: As it announced Lai's death sentence, the court in a statement called Lai "lawless and extremely greedy."

Lai is the latest in a string of prominent officials and executives who have fallen from grace in the years since Beijing first began taking steps to curb risks and tighten the Chinese Communist Party's grip on the financial sector. — Courtesy CNN