Two Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators yesterday accused prosecutors of failing to devote the "same level of effort" to the investigation into former Taipei mayor Ma Ying-jeou's (
"It has been 152 days since prosecutors launched their investigation into the Ma case and yet we haven't seen any concrete progress being made by Prosecutor Hou Kuan-jen (侯寬仁)," DPP Legislator Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) said.
Ma was accused of pocketing half of his mayoral "special allowance fund" during his eight years as Taipei mayor.
A staffer in Ma's office admitted to substituting receipts of larger amount for smaller ones in a bid to reduce his work burden, but denied that Ma had had prior knowledge of the scheme.
Tsai argued that the investigation into the "state affairs fund" case was the most onerous of the two because the fund involved sensitive national secrets and the president had constitutional immunity.
Nevertheless, Tsai said, it only took Prosecutor Eric Chen (
First lady Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍) and three presidential aides were indicted in November on charges of corruption and forgery.
The number of receipts pros-ecutors have had to sift through in Ma's case was 5,240 less than the number involved in the "state affairs fund" case -- and yet the investigation is still ongoing, Tsai said.
"After the DPP came to power, political parties -- both the ruling and opposition parties -- said that the judiciary should be independent. But the judiciary seems to be clinging to political affiliations. This becomes very clear when we compare the manner in which the `state affairs fund' and the `special allowance fund' cases have been handled," Tsai said.
DPP Legislator Lin Su-shan (
He also called on prosecutors to apply the same investigative standards to Ma's case as they had used for the investigation into the president's case "to clear any doubt the public might have about the impartiality of the judicial system."
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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