Former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) office yesterday threatened to take legal action against political commentator Sisy Chen (陳文茜) if she failed to produce evidence to back her claim that the Special Investigation Panel (SIP) suspected the former president had smuggled US dollars overseas.
The former president’s office issued a statement dismissing the allegation made by Sisy Chen and challenged her to offer a clear account of who at the SIP told her that Chen Shui-bian had secretly shipped US dollars abroad and when the source made this claim.
The statement said all expenses related to the former president’s state visits were arranged by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and there were records of the money, including how and where the money was spent.
“The allegation has no basis in truth and makes no sense at all,” the statement said. “The former president has never taken advantage of his state visits to smuggle private money overseas.”
Sisy Chen wrote in her column in Saturday’s edition of the Chinese-language Apple Daily that the former president insisted on conducting a state visit abroad at the height of a corruption scandal in 2006 and now the SIP suspected that he had smuggled US dollars abroad.
Sisy Chen said in the story, whose headline read “Turn the ugly page,” that the former president benefited financially from the “second financial reform,” in which local banks were encouraged to merge to expand their market shares. She also said he handpicked three younger up-and-coming party members to run for top jobs in Taipei County, Taichung City and Kaohsiung City.
All of them lost because of complications caused by a riot staged by foreign laborers working on the construction of Kaohsiung City’s mass rapid transit system, she said.
The former president’s wife, on the other hand, was hiding a vast amount of money, Sisy Chen said, adding that a caller to a TV program had informed her that the former first lady put the money in Cathay United Bank.
In addition to requesting that Sisy Chen prove her claims, the office asked the SIP to clarify whether it had leaked the information on an ongoing case.
The office did not want to see media outlets break the law or commit human rights violations, the statement said.
Meanwhile, the former president yesterday began to eat solid food.
After agreeing to drink some liquid drawn from boiled rice on last Wednesday, the former president began to eat congee on Friday.
He has been detained without charge since Nov. 12 and had refused to eat since Nov. 13 in protest at what he called “political persecution.”
He is suspected of money laundering, accepting bribes, forgery and embezzling NT$15 million (US$448,000) during his presidency.
The former president has accused the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration of waging a “political vendetta” against him to curry favor with China.
The former president’s lawyer, Cheng Wen-long (鄭文龍), told reporters after visiting his client at the Taipei Detention Center yesterday afternoon that his client has resumed eating and his health has gradually improved.
Cheng said he would request that the detention center provide his client with newspapers, which is a privilege detainees are usually denied.
Cheng said that his client has finished writing a book chronicling his detention so far and is in the process of writing another on Taiwanese independence.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS