Six city school principals, five high-ranking school officials and four chiefs of architects' firms, were by the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors' Office indicted for corruption yesterday for allegedly receiving kickbacks from contractors engaged on school construction projects, a newspaper reported.
The six principals indicted for corruption are Chou Chung-hsin (
The 15 defendants were indicted by prosecutors based on the Statute for the Punishment of Corruption (
Prosecutors are seeking the heaviest penalties for Chou, who was charged with having received bribes of more than NT$4.8 million, including life imprisonment, a NT$3 million fine and lifetime deprivation of civil rights.
After the indictments were announced, Michael Tseng (曾憲政), head of the Kaohsiung City Government's Bureau of Education, said that those indicted were presumed innocent until found guilty. Therefore, Tseng said, the bureau would not transfer the indicted principals to other posts for the time being.
Tseng added that the incident dealt a big blow to the morale of education personnel. The six principals performed well in running their schools and had contributed a lot to education, Tseng said.
Tseng said that an investigation into the cases by the bureau had failed to find any evidence of corruption. The evidence collected by prosecutors, was he said, here-say from the contractors involved.
Tseng said he hoped the court would collect substantive evidence and judge the cases properly as soon as possible.
RSS