Magistrates in France have ended a five-year probe into alleged kickbacks paid to French officials for the US$2.8 billion sale of frigates to Taiwan, without getting to the bottom of the affair, legal officials said on Thursday.
But the case, alleged to be the biggest French corruption scandal in the last 50 years, may never come to court.
This is because successive French governments have refused to give the two investigating magistrates access to top-secret defense files that would have identified those at the center of the complex case.
The parties involved were informed of the magistrates' decision on Wednesday and have 20 days in which to request further action, said the officials, who declined to be identified.
The files will then be handed over to the state prosecutor general, who will make recommendations on how to proceed.
But given the government's refusal to release the defense files, the magistrates may well have to drop the case for lack of evidence.
The inquiry, launched in 2001, centred on accusations that a substantial proportion of the US$2.8 billion paid by Taiwan in 1991 for six French-made frigates went on commissions to middlemen, politicians and military officers in Taiwan, China and France.
Allegations of backhanders emerged after the body of the officer who ran the navy's weapons acquisitions office was found floating in the sea off the east coast in 1993.
Further suspicions arose when courts in Switzerland discovered US$520 million in accounts held by the businessman Andrew Wang (
But the probe ran aground on Oct. 4 when French Economy Minister Thierry Breton refused to declassify documents requested by investigating magistrates Renaud van Ruymbeke and Xaviere Simeoni.
The refusal was the fourth time in five years that Paris had blocked the investigation, on the grounds that the documents contained defense secrets.
The customs documents requested contain the names of Chinese and Taiwanese officials who received commissions relating to the deal.
The contract for the sale of the warships explicitly banned payments to intermediaries.
If it was proved that secret kickbacks were indeed handed out to clinch the deal, Paris could be forced to compensate Taiwan to the tune of nearly one billion euros (US$1.25 billion), according to former French judge Thierry Jean-Pierre.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods