Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday rebutted charges brought against him in a defamation lawsuit related to comments he made in 2005 on the 1991 purchase of Lafayette-class frigates from France.
Chen’s office made public the argument he made in court on Tuesday, saying that the case should be thrown out of court because the allegations made against him “had no basis in truth whatsoever.”
The ruling will be handed down on Sept. 9 after the Taipei District Court held its final hearing on Tuesday.
WHO ORDERED WHOM?
Chen said it was not true that a decision to purchase frigates from France instead of South Korea had been approved by then-president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) at a military meeting presided over by Lee, as claimed by one of the plaintiffs, retired Vice Admiral Lei Hsueh-ming (雷學明).
From his own experience as president, Chen said that the monthly military meetings are purely symbolic and that the president has no say on arms procurements.
Chen said the government planned in 1988 to purchase South Korean frigates. But during a trip to France in May 1989, former chief of general staff Hau Pei-tsun (郝柏村) asked the Navy to suspend the plan, and the government decided in 1990 to purchase the French-made ships.
Chen said a statement by Lee that the change must have been ordered by Hau and the military made sense.
In addition, Chen said he had never claimed that Lei received kickbacks as part of the deal, but had only said that people other than arms broker Andrew Wang (汪傳浦) and former naval Captain Kuo Li-heng (郭力恆) must have been involved in the decision.
Chen said the essence of his interview with ETTV on Dec. 1, 2005, was to raise questions about whether to continue the investigation after investigators retrieved six boxes of information from abroad and a French newspaper reported that Kuo had taken a US$20 million cut.
Chen dismissed claims that he had obtained classified reports containing the details of the frigate deal and then used the information for his own political gain. Such an accusation was “far from the truth,” Chen said.
UNRELATED DOUBTS
Chen said the doubts he raised about the case had nothing to do with those raised by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator William Lai (賴清德) and former DPP legislator Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇).
The lawsuit listed Chen, Lai and Hsu as codefendants.
Chen, who began investigating the case when he was a legislator, claimed that the deal involved NT$15 billion (US$500 million) in kickbacks.
Wang, the key suspect in the scandal, fled the country following the murder of naval captain Yin Ching-feng (尹清楓) in 1993. Yin is believed to have been about to blow the whistle on colleagues taking kickbacks.
Wang has been charged in absentia with murder, corruption, money laundering and fraud.
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