Chenlan Temple head denies being on the run

As the Black Gold Investigation Center (查緝黑金行動中心) continues its investigations into the activities of the Chenlan Temple (鎮瀾宮), its chairman, Yen Ching-piao (顏清標), said that his departure from Taiwan was not an attempt to flee justice.

"This is a simple matter. People shouldn't be so imaginative," Yen said during a phone interview yesterday.

Yen said that the purpose of his Chinese trip was to visit Taiwanese businessmen there to thank them for their sponsorship of a recent pilgrimage made by the temple's followers to Meizhou in China's Fujian Province.

Yen said he would return to Taiwan as soon as his tasks there were completed.

He left for China via Hong Kong on Thursday afternoon, hours after prosecutors raided the temple in Taichung County.

Speculation has spread in the media that that the raid, headed by the investigation center's Central Taiwan Special Investigation Team, targeted Yen personally.

Prosecutors alleged that the temple had rented out land adjacent to the temple to local businesses, but that the land in question belonged to the county government. Local street vendors were made to pay up to NT$20,000 per month for the right to do business around the temple, the investigators said.

Yen said he was not personally responsible for the day-to-day operations of the temple, but he said he believed the temple was not involved in any illicit activities or dealings.

"I'll definitely clarify all these matters for the public," Yen said.

Yen said he was not one of the so-called "big tigers" targeted in the government's on-going operations against gangsters and "black gold" politics.

"I'm supportive of the government's crackdown on gangsters as long as it is impartial in its investigations," Yen said.

Prosecutor Lee Chin-yi (李慶義), who leads the Chenlan Temple investigation, said the prosecution is neutral in its operations.

Lee added that Yen's departure would not hamper the investigation because there was no plan yet to subpoena Yen for questioning and that prosecutors were still analyzing the account books seized from the temple to check for irregularities.

He would not disclose further details on the grounds that making sensitive information public could compromise the ongoing investigation work.

Interviewed by reporters yesterday, Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan (陳定南) said there was no selectivity in the handling of "black gold" criminal cases and stressed that the judiciary would use whatever evidence it had to punish both "tigers (打老虎)" (organized crime bosses) and "houseflies (打蒼蠅)" (small-time crooks).

Chen, however, would not comment on the details of the case, but said it was entirely up to the prosecutors to decide whether legal action would be taken against the Chenlan Temple.

Chen also said yesterday, during a meeting with a group of prosecutors in Hualien, that elections for local farmers' associations next year would be a "warm-up" for the government's crackdown on "black gold" and vote-buying.

"If we don't make inroads into the `black gold' problem, the judicial system will be accused by the public of being nothing more than a `paper tiger,'" Chen said.

But the upcoming elections for county commissioners and city mayors as well as legislators would be the "main focus" of our efforts, Chen added.

President Chen was elected president in mid-March on a platform, which emphasized his intention to crack down on the "black gold" phenomenon believed to permeate many aspects of the local political environment.