Tainan prosecutors indicted five professional baseball players and Tainan County Council Speaker Wu Chien-bao (吳健保) on Tuesday for fixing professional baseball games.
The indictment said that beginning in 2005, Wu allegedly ran an illegal gambling business that punters would use to bet on professional baseball games.
He allegedly paid former Chinatrust Whales players Tseng Han-chou (曾漢州), Cheng Chang-ming (鄭昌明), Chi Chun-lin (紀俊麟), Chen Chien-wei (陳健偉) and Huang Kwei-yu (黃貴裕) to fix the games they were involved in during April and May of that year.
Prosecutors are seeking a six-year sentence for Wu and six months each for the former players, the indictment sheet said.
Wu did not respond to the ruling.
Chinatrust Whales general manager Lin Min-cheng (林敏政) said that the team would seek compensation from the former players if they are convicted.
“We will seek compensation from them as the team was a victim of their fakery,” Lin said.
The prosecutors’ indictment said that Wu began to enlist the services of the players because the gambling business that he was running had lost a lot of money.
The five players accepted an offer of NT$2 million (US$66,000) for each game they fixed and helped Wu affect the results in five games, it said. Of the five games, three finished in accordance with Wu’s expectations, the indictment said.
Costa Rica sent a group of intelligence officials to Taiwan for a short-term training program, the first time the Central American country has done so since the countries ended official diplomatic relations in 2007, a Costa Rican media outlet reported last week. Five officials from the Costa Rican Directorate of Intelligence and Security last month spent 23 days in Taipei undergoing a series of training sessions focused on national security, La Nacion reported on Friday, quoting unnamed sources. The Costa Rican government has not confirmed the report. The Chinese embassy in Costa Rica protested the news, saying in a statement issued the same
Temperatures in New Taipei City’s Sindian District (新店) climbed past 37°C yesterday, as the Central Weather Administration (CWA) issued heat alerts for 16 municipalities, warning the public of intense heat expected across Taiwan. The hottest location in Taiwan was in Sindian, where the mercury reached 37.5°C at about 2pm, according to CWA data. Taipei’s Shilin District (士林) recorded a temperature of 37.4°C at noon, Taitung County’s Jinfeng Township (金峰) at 12:50 pm logged a temperature of 37.4°C and Miaoli County’s Toufen Township (頭份) reached 36.7°C at 11:40am, the CWA said. The weather agency yesterday issued a yellow level information notice for Taipei, New
Taiwan’s Liu Ming-i, right, who also goes by the name Ray Liu, poses with a Chinese Taipei flag after winning the gold medal in the men’s physique 170cm competition at the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation Asian Championship in Ajman, United Arab Emirates, yesterday.
A year-long renovation of Taipei’s Bangka Park (艋舺公園) began yesterday, as city workers fenced off the site and cleared out belongings left by homeless residents who had been living there. Despite protests from displaced residents, a city official defended the government’s relocation efforts, saying transitional housing has been offered. The renovation of the park in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華), near Longshan Temple (龍山寺), began at 9am yesterday, as about 20 homeless people packed their belongings and left after being asked to move by city personnel. Among them was a 90-year-old woman surnamed Wang (王), who last week said that she had no plans