On the first day of his long-awaited corruption trial, former top Chinese official Bo Xilai denied that he accepted $3.5 million in bribes in exchange for government favors.

The trial in the Intermediate People’s Court of Jinan, in China’s Shandong province, was closed to foreign reporters, with only a selected number of local reporters allowed to attend the hearings. But the court provided information about the proceedings via its Weibo micro-blog feed.