The Kaohsiung District Prosecutors' Office detained the major shareholder of Zanadau Development Corp yesterday morning to facilitate its probe into the snowballing scandal involving some high-ranking government officials and top business people.
Zanadau major shareholder Su Hui-chen (蘇惠珍) was held on suspicions that she used her company's capital and colluded with Kaohsiung County Government officials to obtain approval for the Zanadau project, Chinese-language media reported yesterday.
Kaohsiung prosecutors summoned 15 people for questioning, including Su, Monday and decided to detain Su to prevent her from coordinating her testimony with other suspects.
Prosecutors found that, from March to July 1994, Su purchased 57 tracts of farmland for the Tahu development project at between NT$3,700 and NT$14,500 per ping, totaling more than NT$400 million.
But in August the same year, Su sold 30 of the 57 tracks of land for the preparation office of the Hsin Jui Department Store (新瑞百貨公司) she founded at a soaring price of NT$80,000 per ping, raking in more than NT$1.82 billion, a move that raised suspicions that she was attempting to abuse the company's resources.
Repeating the practice, Su sold the 30 tracks of land to Zanadau in January 1997 at NT$175,000 per ping, totalling more than NT$3.92 billion.
Prosecutors are holding Su on suspicion of breach of trust.
In the same case, Lin Chi-jui (林琦瑞), Kaohsiung County Government's former reconstruction bureau chief and current deputy traffic bureau chief, was detained at 3am yesterday, under suspicion of delinquency.
The report said Zanadau failed to start construction within nine months of approval as required by law, but the county government still issued the company a license, allegedly allowing it to benefit from rising land prices.
After Lin's detention, one focus of the investigation appeared to shift to the then Kaohsiung county commissioner Yu Cheng-hsien (余政憲), now the Minister of the Interior, and his mother, Senior Adviser to the President Yu Chen Yueh-ying (余陳月瑛), who served as president of Zanadau.
The Zanadau development project was approved during Yu Cheng-hsien's tenure as county commissioner.
Both the mother and son expressed their respect for the judicial agencies as well as their willingness to cooperate with the investigation, the report said.
The KMT's legislative whip Lee Chuan-chiao (林全教) yesterday said that investigators and prosecutors "were going in the wrong direction," according to the report.
Su's aides expressed doubt about the real motive behind Su's detention by asking why the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors' Office decided to take her into custody even though she has no intention of running away.
The report quoted unnamed sources as saying that political forces might have intervened into the investigation and that detaining Su to prevent her to from revealing information related to the case will minimize the impact.
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