Prosecutors in charge of probing former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) alleged money laundering activities said yesterday they did not have enough evidence to prove that funds that flowed into a Palauan bank account were connected to the former president.
On Monday, Palauan President Johnson Toribiong was reported to have said in a TV interview in Palau that in 2005, an unidentified wire of US$41 million was routed through Palau’s Pacific Savings Bank to the US and other countries. The bank later collapsed and Palauan authorities are investigating the matter, he said.
“I do not know where the money came from and where it went to. We have asked for judicial assistance from Taiwan,” Toribiong was quoted as saying.
The Supreme Prosecutor’s Office’s Special Investigation Panel’s (SIP) probe into the money flow and overseas assets of Chen and his family members has not produced any evidence that indicated the family wired money to or from Palau, prosecutors said.
The SIP also said it had not received a request for assistance from Palau.
Chen’s office denied allegations on Tuesday that Chen had taken advantage of trips abroad to transport cash. A statement said Chen never used the presidential plane to transport money abroad.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift