When the presidential election is over, former president Lee Teng-hui (
"Lee was the president of the country at the time. We need his answers to some of our questions," said Huang Jiunn-ming (黃俊明), the district court spokesman.
Huang said that the case is now being handled by presiding judge Liao Wen-yu (
PHOTO: LUO PEI-TEH, TAIPEI TIMES
When approached by reporters yesterday, Lee said that he would be more than happy to tell the judges everything he knows.
"It is not a bad thing to be summoned. Of course I will go," Lee said.
It will be Lee's second appearance in a court hearing of this nature. On Nov. 12 last year he testified in the hearing about the Zanadau investment scandal.
In addition to Lee, the court is also planning to summon former minister of foreign affairs Jason Hu (
The NSB scandal started with the disappearance in 1994 of US$4.5 million from a secret fund of US$10.58 million to secure diplomatic relations with South Africa. According to prosecutors' investigation, the bureau paid the money to South Africa on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May 1994.
On April 4, 1999, the ministry returned a total of US$10.7 million, including interest, to the NSB. The buereau's former chief accountant, Hsu Ping-chiang (徐炳強), allegedly asked former chief cashier Liu Kuan-chun (劉冠軍) to deposit US$7.5 million in the Taiwan Research Institute's bank account.
Liu Kuan-chun is suspected of embezzling more than NT$192 million from the total amount. According to the Bureau of Investigation, he left Taiwan on Sept. 3, 2000, and went to Shanghai. He surfaced in Bangkok in January 2002 and then went to North America. Sources say that he is now in Canada.
On Nov. 17 last year, the Taipei Prosecutors' Office charged Hsu and Liu Kuan-chun with corruption and asked the court for a sentence of 15 years for Hsu and 12 years for Liu.
Liu Tai-ying had allegedly wired the money to Yin's bank accounts in the US and Singapore. Yin then allegedly wired the money to one of Ruentex's bank accounts in Taiwan, after which he "donated" US$3 million of it to the Taiwan Research Institute.
According to Hsu's testimony, he had acted on orders from former NSB secretary-general Yin Tsung-wen (殷宗文). The initial order allegedly came from Lee.
Ting took Yin Tsung-wen's position after he retired. However, Yin Tsung-wen died of adenocarcinoma, a kind of lung cancer, on March 28 last year.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,