Hsieh aide may be bagman for Chu

The Kaohsiung District Court yesterday formally detained Wang Wen-cheng (王文正), director of the Civil Affairs Department of the Kaohsiung City Government and widely regarded as a confidant of Mayor Frank Hsieh (謝長廷).

Wang is suspected of serving as a middleman to assist newly elected city-council speaker Chu An-hsiung (朱安雄) to bribe city councilors in the Dec. 25 election for the council's speaker and vice speaker.

"Some councilors have clearly told us that Wang was the key person handling the whole vote-buying project and we suspect that he helped deliver money from Chu to some councilors in exchange for their votes for Chu," said Kaohsiung's chief prosecutor, Chou Chang-hsin (周章欽).

"We will further investigate whether Mayor Hsieh was aware of the processes," Chou said.

Hsieh, who is now leading a semi-official visit to the US, immediately instructed acting mayor Lin Yun-chien (林永堅) to suspend Wang's duties. Reacting to questions about the degree of the mayor's involvement, Lin stressed that Hsieh will clarify his innocence at a news conference when he returns to Taiwan today.

"Wang assured Mayor Hsieh that he had nothing to do with Chu's case, and the mayor decided to believe Wang," Lin told reporters yesterday. "Now, however, the developments from the prosecutors' office investigation suggest that Wang didn't tell the whole truth," he said.

Wang had claimed on Dec. 30 that he had been busy with his father's funeral during the campaign period for the mayoral and city councilors' election -- held on Dec. 7 -- and all the way through the runup to and voting in the speaker's election. As a result, he claimed, he had no time to arrange any negotiations between councilors and Chu.

Wang was arraigned by the prosecutors' office Monday afternoon. Since he refused to be interrogated during the night, the prosecutors' office decided to transfer him to the district court in the morning and asked the court to detain him.

Prosecutors believe that Wang was only one of the go-betweens for Chu in the vote-buying scandal. Hsien Chi-yu (賢繼禹), director of Chu's election campaign office, and Huang Hsin-chung (黃信中), director of a local radio station in Kaohsiung, are also suspected of being bagmen for Chu.

The Southern Taiwan Society, a group of pro-independence academics, yesterday urged Hsieh to find out the truth and rebuild the reputation of his administration.

Meanwhile, the district prosecutors' office yesterday summoned two newly-elected PFP councilors, Lin Shou-shan (林壽山) and Chien Chin-cheng (簡金城), for questioning over whether they had taken bribes, but both were released last night after claiming their innocence.

Over 20 councilors have been asked to report to the prosecutors' office but this does not mean that all of them received money from Chu, prosecutors' office officials said, adding that nor are those councilors who have not been asked to report necessarily innocent.

Prosecutors' office officials are not allowed to publicize the names of those councilors who had already reported to the office, nor are they allowed to say how many of them have promised to turn themselves in and act as witnesses in the prosecution of other councilors.

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