Cao Jianming delivers a report on the work of the Supreme People's Procuratorate at a meeting of the annual parliament session Thursday. [Xinhua]

China's procuratorate conducted graft probes against 2,670 officials above county level last year, including eight at the provincial or ministerial level, said Prosecutor-General Cao Jianming Thursday.

Cao told nearly 3,000 lawmakers at the annual session of the parliament that prosecutors investigated about 41,000 officials, down 3.3 percent, in more than 32,000 cases, up 0.9 percent, of embezzlement, bribery, dereliction of duty and other work-related crimes last year.

The eight high-ranking officials include Huang Songyou, former vice president of the Supreme People's Court and Wang Yi, former vice president of the state-run China Development Bank.

Also on the list are Chen Shaoji, former top political advisor of southern Guangdong Province, and Wang Huayuan, a former provincial official in eastern Zhejiang Province.

Among the probed, more than 18,000 were "extremely serious" corruption cases, while 3,100 were grave cases in connection to dereliction of duty or infringement of people's rights, according to the report on the work of the Supreme People's Procuratorate delivered by Cao.

More than 9,300 government workers were implicated in cases of dereliction of duty, malfeasance and infringement of people's rights, Cao said.

Nearly 3,200 bribers were punished "in an effort to strengthen crackdown on bribery offering crimes," he said.

Cao said the authorities seized more than 1,100 on-the-run suspects involved in work-related crimes, with more than 7.1 billion yuan (about one billion U.S. dollars) embezzled or received in bribes recovered.

About 4,000 corrupt officials have made off to Canada, the United States, Australia and other countries with over 50 billion U.S. dollars of public money in the last three decades, according to statistics of the Ministry of Commerce.

To weed out judicial corruption, Cao said prosecutors investigated more than 2,700 judiciary workers suspected of graft and malpractice for personal gains.