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
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US