The Taipei District Prosecutors' Office yesterday indicted business tycoon and KMT legislator Gary Wang (
The prosecution recommended that Wang be sentenced to four years and 10 months in jail, and Tsai be sentenced to three years.
Wang and Tsai, however, both insisted they were innocent.
Wang said in a TV interview that during the investigation he had told the truth and provided all relevant information to the prosecution. He believed that the court would ultimately clear his name.
Tsai held a press conference at the Legislative Yuan to say he was "surprised to be among the indicted." He said he had responded to the subpoena of the prosecution three times as a witness, not as a suspect.
He said he had nothing to do with the land deal.
The case involved two stages of sale and purchase of an approximately 75,000m2 plot of land in Yangmei (楊梅) Township, Taoyuan (桃園) County. During each stage, under-the-table deals between the two sides inflated the price to create illegal profits, according to the prosecution.
Gary Wang was chairman of Far Eastern Silo and Shipping (FESS,
Chu bought the land in 1995 for NT$500 million, but although land prices fell while he owned it, he sold it to FESS for NT$845 million.
The prosecution said around NT$189 million of the price difference found its way via several dummy accounts into the accounts of another company owned by Wang.
Chu's company also made NT$55 million from the artificially raised price, the prosecution said.
The prosecution said this was a conspiracy in which Wang, Chu and two others squeezed money out of FESS and its shareholders. FESS intended to build a villa complex on the land but, due to a continuing decline in real estate prices, Wang then sought, after partially developing it, to sell it off at an inflated price to the state-run Taiwan Development and Trust Corp (TDTC, 台開), also a listed company, the indictment says.
Wang then, according to the indictment, asked his close aide Chou Chi-peng (周繼鵬) to forge purchase records relating to the land and to manipulate a real estate valuation company into inflating the price of the land. Wang then asked Tsai Hau and Kao Chien-wen (高建文), both board members of the TDTC and the latter the vice chairman, to push the board into making a decision to buy the land in November 1999 -- despite a report conducted by the TDTC only a month earlier that concluded that such an investment was not worthwhile, the indictment continues.
The TDTC, the indictment says, bought the plot of land from the FESS at a price of NT$1.8 billion. Tsai, the indictment alleges, later received more than NT$130 million and Kao NT$30 million from Wang as kickbacks.
The prosecution said Tsai, now board chairman and publisher of the Min Chun Daily News (民眾日報), used the money to buy the newspaper. Tsai, however, denied the charge and said the purchase was a legal investment by Wang's Eastern Television (東森電視).
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