Academia Sinica President Wong Chi-huey (翁啟惠), who was accused of insider trading following his endorsement of biotechnology company OBI Pharma despite its failed cancer drug trials, returned to Taiwan on Friday last week. He faces a mountain of “trials” of his own.
These days, with the ubiquitous Internet, there are few places for conceit to hide for long. Any deception would come back and slap people in the face: Honesty is the best policy.
When investing in the technology sector, the common practice is to be completely upfront about what you know. Anything short of full disclosure is sure to get you in a bit of a hole: “What a tangled web we weave,” as the saying goes.
It seems that Wong has been, to a degree, guilty of this. There do seem to be questions over the tax and legal implications concerning the Optimer shares that his daughter, Wong Yu-shioh (翁郁琇), originally owned: how she came about the financial wherewithal to purchase OBI Pharma shares; to what extent the shares were exchanged for Optimer shares; whether it has anything to do with Wong Chi-huey’s transfer of technology; whether the shares were given as a gift and the tax implications thereof; whether the capital flows from the Wongs divesting themselves of more than 1,000,000 OBI Pharma shares were completely legal; and when Wong Chi-huey sold the OBI Pharma shares on behalf of his daughter, was he doing it on her behalf, or was it a case of those shares being under her name, but actually belonging to him?
These are the facts: On Feb. 18, Wong Chi-huey received a telephone call from an E.Sun Securities employee, after which he sold 10,000 OBI Pharma shares on his daughter’s behalf.
In all honesty, due to the moral factors and the effects on social interest, the feeling is that Wong should not be dabbling in shares while he is running Academia Sinica.
However, then came the mumblings in the media and on political talk shows of insider trading and stock market manipulation.
People were starting to question what exactly Wong Chi-huey’s intentions were.
His daughter owns about 2 million shares. Would insider trading not involve selling the whole lot? What kind of inside trader would only sell such a small number of shares? That same day, 2.09 million OBI Pharma shares were traded.
The suggestion that the sale of merely 10,000 shares was done in an attempt to manipulate the market is laughable.
It must be a real pain for prosecutors when the cases they are investigating are tried by media and the court of public opinion.
It is entirely contradictory to on the one hand say that Wong Chi-huey selling 10,000 OBI Pharma shares the evening before the company announced that the cancer drug tests failed to return satisfactory results was a case of insider trading and a sign that he did not like the company’s prospects, and on the other, to say that when he endorsed the company three days after the failed trials, he did so because he liked its prospects.
Prosecutors are investigating if any OBI Pharma employees — the president, the managing director, the director of research and development, the chief financial officer or the associate general manager — were engaged in short-selling of the stocks using pseudonyms or shell companies.
However, does this cohere with the criticism of Wong Chi-huey’s endorsement of the drugs, in which he said that the failure of the tests does not necessarily mean the drugs do not work?
Too many questions, too many contradictions.
Chang Kuo-tsai is a retired National Hsinchu University of Education associate professor and a former deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Association of University Professors.
Translated by Paul Cooper
Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) led a bipartisan delegation to Taiwan in late February. During their various meetings with Taiwan’s leaders, this delegation never missed an opportunity to emphasize the strength of their cross-party consensus on issues relating to Taiwan and China. Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi are leaders of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Their instruction upon taking the reins of the committee was to preserve China issues as a last bastion of bipartisanship in an otherwise deeply divided Washington. They have largely upheld their pledge. But in doing so, they have performed the
It is well known that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) ambition is to rejuvenate the Chinese nation by unification of Taiwan, either peacefully or by force. The peaceful option has virtually gone out of the window with the last presidential elections in Taiwan. Taiwanese, especially the youth, are resolved not to be part of China. With time, this resolve has grown politically stronger. It leaves China with reunification by force as the default option. Everyone tells me how and when mighty China would invade and overpower tiny Taiwan. However, I have rarely been told that Taiwan could be defended to
It should have been Maestro’s night. It is hard to envision a film more Oscar-friendly than Bradley Cooper’s exploration of the life and loves of famed conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. It was a prestige biopic, a longtime route to acting trophies and more (see Darkest Hour, Lincoln, and Milk). The film was a music biopic, a subgenre with an even richer history of award-winning films such as Ray, Walk the Line and Bohemian Rhapsody. What is more, it was the passion project of cowriter, producer, director and actor Bradley Cooper. That is the kind of multitasking -for-his-art overachievement that Oscar
Chinese villages are being built in the disputed zone between Bhutan and China. Last month, Chinese settlers, holding photographs of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), moved into their new homes on land that was not Xi’s to give. These residents are part of the Chinese government’s resettlement program, relocating Tibetan families into the territory China claims. China shares land borders with 15 countries and sea borders with eight, and is involved in many disputes. Land disputes include the ones with Bhutan (Doklam plateau), India (Arunachal Pradesh, Aksai Chin) and Nepal (near Dolakha and Solukhumbu districts). Maritime disputes in the South China