The Taiwan High Court yesterday reduced the prison sentence for former Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) Examination Bureau director-general Lee Chin-chen (李進誠) from 10 years to nine years and six months for his involvement in the “vultures” insider-trading scandal.
In addition to his nine-and-a-half-year sentence, high court judges also deprived Lee of his civil rights for five years.
Stock investor Chen Chun-chi (陳俊吉) was sentenced to three years in prison and fined NT$10 million (US$330,000). Chen was sentenced to three years and 10 months in jail with a fine of NT$15 million in the first verdict, which was handed down on June 6, 2006.
The Taipei District Court ruled in 2006 that Lee had leaked confidential information about a government probe into Power Quotient International Co (PQI) to Lin Ming-da (林明達), an investor who used the information for profit.
Taipei prosecutors launched an investigation into PQI in January 2005, after the firm posted revenue figures for 2004 that officials found suspicious. They began probing Lee’s actions in March 2005 after PQI’s shares plummeted on the stock exchange.
An investigation showed that Lee told Lin on March 11 that PQI headquarters would soon be raided. Lin immediately borrowed a substantial amount of money to short-sell PQI.
On March 15, Lee told the Chinese-language United Daily News reporter Kao Nien-yi (高年億) that PQI headquarters would be raided in a day or two. Kao’s story, which was published the next day, was credited with sending PQI’s share price down.
Lin was also sentenced to two years in prison, but judges instead gave him five years probation. He was fined NT$20 million.
Chen and another investor, Chen Yung-cheng (陳永承), and a senior employee of the Taiwan Stock Exchange Chang Hsi-kuan (張錫寬) were also convicted and fined for violating the Securities and Exchange Law (證券交易法).
The five became known in the media as the “vultures” and made about NT$15 million from insider trading.
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
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater