Control Yuan member Yu Teng-fang (余騰芳) said yesterday that he had found “conversations far from what would be considered normal” during his investigations into recent military promotion scandals while checking telephone call records.
Telephone conversations of three military officials who have been detained over the scandals as well as their wives possibly contained irregularities, Yu said, declining to elaborate.
Yu and two of his colleagues, Huang Huang-hsiung (黃煌雄) and Lee Ping-nan (李炳南), went to the Banciao District Prosecutors Office yesterday to listen to briefings from prosecutors.
The prosecutors earlier this month indicted former lieutenant-general Yuan Hsiao-lung (袁肖龍) and 11 businessmen on charges of bribery and blackmail in a military scandal in which several high-ranking officers were accused of securing promotions by offering bribes.
Prosecutors are seeking a 22-year jail term for Yuan.
Yu said last Saturday that he would subpoena former chief of general staff Huo Shou-yeh (霍守業) — who is alleged to have accepted bribes from the officers — to answer questions this week, but he said yesterday that he would talk to other officers first.
CHEN SHUI-BIAN
Meanwhile, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday denied any knowledge of allegations that Huo accepted bribes from officers.
Former national policy adviser to the president Huang Tien-fu (黃天福) told reporters after visiting Chen at the Taipei Detention Center in Tucheng (土城), Taipei County, that Chen told him that his understanding was that Huo was a decent man.
Huang said he knew Huo personally and he had the same impression of Huo. Both he and Chen did not know what happened, he said, but whatever it was, Chen said he had nothing to do with it.
Chen told Huang that during his presidency, he had selected individuals from a list of candidates to be promoted to the position of general, while he approved candidates that the Ministry of National Defense had recommended for lieutenant-general positions. He also signed off on promotions to the position of major general, Chen said.
ALLEGATIONS
Prosecutors allege that Huo was acquainted with Lin Chih-chung (林治崇), a middleman who headed a group of businessmen indicted on suspicion that they won military contracts after bribing military officers with cash and prostitutes.
Prosecutors said Lin showed Yuan a “recommendation letter” from then-Presidential Office deputy secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) to gain Yuan’s trust that he could secure Yuan’s promotion. Cho, however, told prosecutors that he never wrote such a letter for Yuan.
The Presidential Office also said there was no record of such a letter.
The Ministry of National Defense said in a press release on April 7 that there was no evidence that Huo was connected to the case.
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