■ Executives indicted
Shinkong Financial Holding Co (新光金控) chairman Eugene Wu (吳東進) and his finacial adviser Wu Tung-hsiung (吳統雄) were indicted yesterday by the Taipei District Prosecutors' Office on suspicion of insider trading, after the collapsed merger between Shinkong Financial and Taishin Financial Holdings Co (台新金控) in 2002. The two companies announced on June 25, 2002, that they would merge in a share swap deal. But to facilitate the deal, Taishin had asked Shinkong to set aside an additional NT$19.6 billion to cover potential losses stemming from higher insurance policy claims. Because of the additional provision, Shinkong later decided to report an after-tax loss of NT$8.82 billion instead of an earlier forecast of NT$3.96 billion profit that year, which angering Taishin, which called off the merger on July 3 the same year. Prosecutors accused Eugene Wu and Wu Tung-hsiung of insider trading of stocks, as they allegedly sold the Shinkong shares they owned two weeks before the announcement of revised financial forecast. Taishin chairman Thomas Wu (吳東亮) is the younger brother of Eugene Wu.
■ CAL, Delta share codes
Taiwan's leading carrier China Airlines (CAL, 華航) said yesterday it will expand code-sharing services with US-based Delta Air Lines starting Monday. CAL will add three additional code-sharing destinations on Delta flights from Los Angeles to Orlando, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa while Delta will place its codes on CAL flights from Taipei to Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, it said. The new services will allow passengers to fly to Atlanta, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa via Los Angeles, or from San Francisco to Atlanta, or from Honolulu to Los Angeles and San Francisco. CAL will operate 13 destinations in the US after the expanded code-sharing. Meanwhile, Delta will place its codes on CAL flights from Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York (JFK), San Francisco and Seattle to Taipei, and onward to Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.
■ E-mail filter launched
New e-mail filtering software developed by two domestic universities was launched yesterday, with its creators claiming it can filter some 97 percent of junk mails, the National Chung Cheng University (NCCU) announced. According to Kuo Yao-huang (郭耀煌), the software, dubbed "Nopam, " was jointly developed by NCCU and National Tsinghua University, and can handle more than 1 million e-mails in Intel Pentium 4 computers per day, with the error margin of less than 0.01 percent. This software will be offered to various schools or academic sectors of the country for free, Kuo said, adding that he is proud of the achievement. NCCU Professor Lee Hsing-lin (李新林) noted that the research and development of computer software is quite difficult in Taiwan, as few entrepreneurs are willing to dedicate themselves to this area, and therefore it needs long-term efforts. Wu Sheng (吳昇), director of NCCU's Internet center, said some junk mails are disguised in different versions to elude e-mail filtering software, but Nopam can compare the sources, contents, titles, the similarity, or whether they are sent in quantities to find these junk mails.
■ NT dollar gains
The New Taiwan dollar continued gaining ground against its US counterpart, rising NT$0.013 to close at NT$31.892 on the Taipei foreign exchange market. Turnover was US$597 million, down from US$753 million the previous day.
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump weighed in on a pressing national issue: The rebranding of a restaurant chain. Last week, Cracker Barrel, a Tennessee company whose nationwide locations lean heavily on a cozy, old-timey aesthetic — “rocking chairs on the porch, a warm fire in the hearth, peg games on the table” — announced it was updating its logo. Uncle Herschel, the man who once appeared next to the letters with a barrel, was gone. It sparked ire on the right, with Donald Trump Jr leading a charge against the rebranding: “WTF is wrong with Cracker Barrel?!” Later, Trump Sr weighed
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OUTLOOK: Among the six sub-indices, only the stock market confidence sub-index rose due to strong equity performance and expectations of a US Federal Reserve rate cut Consumer confidence weakened further this month, sliding to its lowest level in two-and-a-half years as households grew increasingly uneasy about the economic outlook, job security and big-ticket spending, a survey by the National Central University showed yesterday. The consumer confidence index fell 1.07 points from last month to 63.31, the weakest number since May 2023, said the university’s Research Center for Taiwan Economic Development (RCTED), which conducts the monthly poll. “Although the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics recently increased Taiwan’s GDP growth forecast for this year to 4.45 percent, consumer sentiment tells a different story,” RCTED director Dachrahn Wu
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