Taipei District Court yesterday ruled against former vice admiral Lei Hsueh-ming (雷學明) in a civil suit he filed against former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and others.
Criminal proceedings were finalized on Sept. 30, when the Taiwan High Court upheld a lower court’s ruling in favor of the former president and current and former legislators.
The case was filed in late 2005 after Chen, speaking on a TV talk show, accused five unnamed retired Navy officers of accepting kickbacks for producing false performance data on Lafayette frigates to persuade the Navy to purchase them from France rather than alternative vessels from South Korea in 1990.
Chen also claimed that the officers had helped inflate the price of the vessels.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator William Lai (賴清德) and then-legislator Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇) repeated the accusations at a separate press conference.
Lei, former rear admiral Wang Chin-sheng (王琴生), former captain Kang Shih-chun (康世淳), former captain Chang Jui-fan (張瑞帆) and former commander Cheng Chih-po (程志波) filed the slander suit against Chen, Hsu and Lai, seeking NT$2.01 billion (US$67 million) in compensation.
On June 13, 2007, Swiss officials returned US$34 million in frozen bank deposits to Taiwan that were believed to be kickbacks connected to the purchase of six Lafayette-class frigates from France in 1991.
In 2008, the Taipei District Court ruled in favor of Chen, Hsu and Lai, finding that they did not commit slander because they harbored no ill will and their remarks were not offensive.
The high court also ruled in their favor, adding that whether kickbacks were involved in the Lafayette corruption scandal was of public concern.
Lei also pressed civil charges, however, the district court yesterday rejected the case. The civil case is not final and may be appealed.
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
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
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