State Public Prosecutor-General Chen Tsung-ming (
The guidelines will help prosecutors working on the numerous cases concerning special allowance funds to avoid differences in how the cases are handled and preempt controversy over probes, Chen told the legislature's Judiciary Committee.
Chen said for the portion of special allowance funds that require no accounting oversight, prosecutors would investigate whether the expenditures were used for public purposes, whether the officials' assets had increased by an unusual amount during their terms of office and whether there was solid evidence that the officials had used the funds for personal reasons.
For the portion of the allowances that do require accounting oversight, Chen said prosecutors would seek to determine whether receipts were received for funds spent on public affairs and whether the accounting offices had disbursed funds in the amounts of the receipts.
However, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Pan Wei-kang (潘維剛) and his colleagues complained during yesterday's committee meeting that the prosecutors who investigated KMT presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) handling of his special allowance when he was Taipei mayor examined the portion of the allowance that does not require accounting oversight, while the prosecutors probing President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) "state affairs fund" case did not touch on the portion of the presidential funding that does not have independent accounting oversight.
Several people have already been indicted in connection with the alleged abuse of special allowance funds.
Last year, prosecutors indicted first lady Wu Shu-jen (
In February, Taipei prosecutors indicted Ma on charges of embezzling NT$11 million (US$333,000) from his special mayoral allowance while Taipei mayor.
Ma was found not guilty of the charges in the first trial.
The Supreme Prosecutors' Office last month indicted Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), Democratic Progressive Party Chairman Yu Shyi-kun and National Security Council Secretary-General Mark Chen (陳唐山) on suspicion of misusing their special allowance funds.
More than 50 individuals, including top level politicians and chiefs of courts and prosecutors' office nationwide, are facing investigations into their use of special allowance funds.
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
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