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Yuanta officials released on bail after questioning

Yuanta Securities Corp (元大證券) chairwoman Judy Tu (杜麗莊) was released on NT$10 million (US$333,000) bail yesterday morning after being called for questioning the previous afternoon over her alleged involvement in an irregular trading case.

Yuanta Securities president Lee Chang (張立秋) and the company’s bond department assistant manager, Wu Li-min (吳麗敏), were also released on bail of NT$2 million and NT$7 million respectively.

The three were banned from leaving the country.

Prosecutors have not indicted the three, but said they suspect the trio violated breach of trust and the Securities Transaction Law (證券交易法).

Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office spokesman Lin Jinn-tsun (林錦村) said that Rudy Ma (馬志玲), Yuanta’s founder and Tu’s husband, and their daughter Ma Wei-hsin (馬維欣), chairwoman for Yuanta Investment Trust Co (元大投信), would soon be subpoenaed.

“We have good reason to believe that Rudy Ma and his daughter are also involved,” Lin said.

Yuanta Securities is the nation’s largest brokerage firm. Forty-seven prosecutors raided 11 locations, including Yuanta Securities’ headquarters in Taipei, on Friday afternoon, after the stock market closed.

The Financial Supervisory Commission launched an investigation into the company last year. The irregularities involved the sale of shares of Yuanta Investment Trust Co to Yuanta Securities in 2005, after the former suffered substantial losses from its investment in interest rate-linked structured notes following a series of interest rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve.

Prosecutors said that Tu reaped an estimated NT$1.1 billion in profit through interest arbitrage, while leaving Yuanta Securities to suffer from absorbing part of its investment affiliates’ losses and damaging the interests of its shareholders.
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