Taichung tycoon Tseng Cheng-jen (
"Tseng's 11-year sentence was the court's decision. However, he disappeared on June 14 and failed to report to us to begin his sentence. So we have decided to announce that he is wanted and we have confiscated his NT$10 million bail," said Lee Ching-yi (
shanghai
LIBERTY TIMES FILE PHOTO
A report circulated on the day Tseng disappeared said that he and his wife, who is five months pregnant, had fled to Shanghai, and that Tseng had paid NT$30 million to arrange the getaway.
Lee said that no evidence of this has been found in the prosecutors' investigation but that they are still trying to confirm it.
"We are trying to figure out whether Tseng has fled. We hope that the rumor is just a rumor and that Tseng will report instead of having to be arrested by either the Chinese authorities or us," Lee said.
chinese authorities
Asked whether prosecutors will seek the cooperation of Chinese authorities if Tseng really has fled to Shanghai, Lee declined to address the issue.
"We have always tried to work with them regarding crackdowns on crime and deporting criminals. But no guarantee has been made at this moment," Lee said.
Tseng, the president of Taichung's Kuangsan Enterprise Group, was sentenced on charges of violating the Securities Transaction Law (
30 years
The Supreme Court's verdict was the result of Tseng's appeal of an initial Taiwan High Court verdict on Aug. 29 last year which sentenced him to 30 years and 10 months in prison on the same charges.
In 2001, Taichung prosecutors discovered that Tseng had, in November 1998, abused his position as the president of the Taichung Business Bank to push through loans worth more than NT$9 billion (US$265 million).
In addition, prosecutors also discovered that Tseng had embezzled NT$9.2 billion from Shuntayu, another subsidiary that he had acquired in 1996.
In the meantime, authorities say, Tseng stole another NT$7.8 billion from his own Kuangsan Group and used the money for personal investments in the stock market.
In the first instance, the Taichung District Court ruled that Tseng had used the embezzled money to purchase stock in Shuntayu in an attempt to boost the firm's share price.
janitors
Tseng also required his employees -- including janitors -- to keep dummy accounts for his illicit financial endeavors.
The court blasted Tseng for masterminding the series of financial irregularities.
Although Tseng had ample funds to cover the stock purchases, he eventually caused the 42 owners of the dummy accounts to face credit problems and lawsuits.
During the initial trial by the Taichung District Court, these 42 co-defendants were given jail terms ranging between four months and 11 years.
However, the High Court decided that the individuals in whose names dummy account were listed were innocent and cleared them of all charges.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching