Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers demanded yesterday that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou's (
In February Ma was indicted for embezzlement for wiring half of his mayoral special allowance into his wife Chow Mei-ching's (
In the indictment, prosecutors said that while Ma's monthly salary was about NT$150,000, he had deposited NT$200,000 a month into his wife's account, which led them to suspect that he was embezzling public funds.
PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMES
The prosecutors said in the indictment that they had not indicted Chou because there was no evidence she was involved.
But DPP Legislator Hsieh Hsin-ni (
"It was clearly stated in the indictment that Ma and Chow used the money in the account to pay their credit card bills and their daughters' tuition fees," she told the press conference.
DPP Legislator Hsu Kuo-yung (
After the press conference the DPP lawmakers went to the Taiwan High Prosecutors Office and the Taipei District Court to file complaint asking the court and prosecutors to look into Chow's involvement.
Ma refused to comment on the lawmakers allegations.
He denied, however, that he was planning to "destroy" his DPP rival, Frank Hsieh (
"I didn't hear of the conspiracy `to destroy Hsieh' until yesterday. But I've been hearing of a conspiracy to attack me for years," Ma said.
While Ma was a man of few words yesterday, his long-time aide and former Taipei deputy mayor King Pu-tsung (
Wang and two DPP city councilors told a press conference on Thursday that King was heading a Kaohsiung-based task force for the KMT aimed at exposing scandals involving Hsieh using information leaked by prosecutors.
"I urged Legislator Wang to correct his false remarks within three days and to admit that he made the accusations based on misleading information provided by Hsieh's campaign office," King said.
In related news, the Taipei Prosecutors' Office released a statement yesterday saying the deposition of a witness in the Ma embezzlement case by Prosecutor Hou Kuan-jen (侯寬仁) was a truthful record.
The statement was a formal rebuttal to allegations by Ma's lawyer, Song Yao-ming (宋耀明), who claimed on Thursday that Hou had altered the testimony of the witness.
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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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