 During the process, it was said that some 518 out of 527 delegates to the municipal congress and 68 congress staff members accepted or received cash or gifts.The scale of the vote-buying scheme earned the scandal significant notoriety nationally, and was said to have been the most serious vote buying scheme since the communist state was founded in 1949.On December 18, 2013, Tong was placed under investigation by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China for "serious violations of laws and regulations".