The Judicial Yuan yesterday said that a preliminary investigation cleared Kaohsiung District Court President Tsai Wen-kuei (
Kaohsiung City Council Speaker Chu An-hsiung (朱安雄) said on Wednesday that he had given the money to Tsai on the understanding that Tsai would secure the release of his wife, Wu Te-mei (吳德美).
Wu and Chu were arrested on Dec. 28 last year in connection with a bribery scandal in his election to the city council's speakership.
"Our internal affairs department's preliminary investigation showed that there are at least two suspects involved in the case but these two suspects have nothing to do with the district court. Tsai is not one of the suspects either," a Judicial Yuan press release said.
According to the press release, Tsai briefed Judicial Yuan President Weng Yueh-sheng (翁岳生) about the case in person on Thursday, after which Weng told the Judicial Yuan's internal affairs department to begin its investigation immediately.
While the report cleared Tsai and all the district court's staff for now, the Judicial Yuan was still seeking the identities of two suspects, a man who called himself "Lee Bing-nan (
Chu said Lee called his campaign office the day he and his wife were arrested, claiming he could help secure the release of Wu within 10 days in exchange for a payment of NT$10 million.
On Chu's behalf, his friend Wang Feng-chuan (
Upon Lee's request, Wang paid the money to a woman, supposedly Tsai's wife, at Kaohsiung's Summit Hotel, although Wang said that the woman denied she was Tsai's wife.
Wu was released after 17 days, and the Kaohsiung District Court said that her release on bail had nothing to do with the alleged bribery case.
Chu claimed that Tsai was unsatisfied with the amount of the bribe and made sure another bribery charge against Chu was prosecuted quickly. In that case, the Supreme court upheld a 22-month prison sentence for Chu for vote-buying in last December's local elections.
He has already admitted to charges of bribing councilors to vote for him in the speakership election and will be sentenced on Nov. 27.
Kaohsiung District Prosecutors' Office said it had assigned Prosecutor Hung Hsin-shu (洪信旭) to lead an investigation into the new bribery allegations.
According to Hung, prosecutors are reviewing closed circuit television records from the Summit Hotel, where the downpayment was made, to identify the woman who accepted the NT$1 million from Wang.
"We have to identify her first so we can locate and identify Lee. That way, we can retrieve the money which was alleged to be the bribe money," Hung said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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