The army general headquarters yesterday said it has found evidence supporting allegations that one of its officers was raking off pension money to be paid to relatives in China of deceased servicemen in Taiwan.
The headquarters denied media reports that the officer might have allegedly taken as much as NT$30 million in commissions from civilian brokers involved.
"Internal investigations over the past two months have revealed that Lieutenant Colonel Fu Chih-kang (符自剛) and a private who worked under him might have been behind the alleged misappropriation of funds. We have sent them to prosecutors for further questioning," army spokesman Major General Ma Yin-chu (馬銀柱) said.
"We will find out what really happened. We will restore their reputations if the two suspects turn out to be innocent of the allegations. If they are guilty, we will seek appropriate punishment for them and their superiors," Ma said.
Major General Li Ching-kuo (李清國), army general headquarters' personnel department director, said he is willing to take administrative responsibility for the matter, since he is Fu's direct superior.
"I will not shun my responsibilities in the matter, although I took the personnel department chief job just three months before the incident came to light in September," Li said.
Colonel Chen Heng-kuei (陳恆珪), who directed the army general headquarters' probe into the case, said their investigation had exonerated Fu of any wrongdoing. But he brushed off speculation that Fu might have taken payoffs as high as NT$30 million.
"Today's news reports said Fu took a 30 percent cut from the retirement pensions of those who may not have been entitled to receive any money," Chen said.
"The money Fu is said to have taken could not be as much as NT$30 million, since the total amount of retirement pensions which were given out during Fu's two years on the job was only NT$106.6 million," Chen said.
"We received signed letters of complaint against Fu on Sept. 8. We then investigation the alleged irregularities quietly without letting the concerned parties know about it," he said.
"We checked over 200 applications approved by Fu to see if there were any suspicious areas. Some of these cases were made via the same brokers," he said.
"We suspect the brokers might have helped produce fake documents to prove that a person had relatives of deceased ex-servicemen living in China," he said.
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