The Taitung District Prosecutors’ Office said on Friday it would indict niether Taitung County Commissioner Kuang Li-chen (鄺麗貞) nor the 13 others who accompanied her on a trip to Europe last year, on corruption charges.
District prosecutors launched an investigation last year after receiving a report from a county government employee that the nine business trips Kuang made abroad using public funds since April 2006 were “private and leisurely” in nature.
Controversy also arose when county residents discovered that Kuang was in Europe instead of at the county’s emergency operation center when a typhoon hit Taiwan in July last year, killing one in Taitung.
Thirteen county officials and township mayors accompanied Kuang on the trip.
Chief prosecutor Feng Cheng (馮成) said that prosecutors did not find anything illegal with Kuang’s trip.
Applications to use public funds on the trip followed proper procedure, the officials on the trip met to assign tasks during the trip and they gathered information relevant to development of tourism on the trip, Feng said, adding that prosecutors did not find that any of the 13 officials on the delegation had any intention to engage in illegal activities.
Feng said the job of the district prosecutors’ office was only to investigate whether Kuang and other officials on the delegation broke the law during their trips; determining whether administrative errors were committed during the trips was not part of its remit, Feng said.
He said that the power to launch a probe into administrative errors rests in the hands of the Control Yuan and the Commission on the Disciplinary Sanctions of Functionaries.
Kuang, a member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), thanked the judiciary for “proving my innocence,” but did not say whether she would run for re-election in the year-end county commissioner election.
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