Two Taiwan High Court judges and three other defendants will remain in custody after their indictment on Monday in connection with two graft scandals, the Taipei District Court said yesterday.
Thirteen people — including three senior High Court judges and former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Miaoli County commissioner Ho Chi-hui (何智輝) — were indicted on corruption charges.
The district court also held hearings to decide whether to continue detaining eight defendants who had been held during the investigation. Those hearings lasted until 4am yesterday. In the end, it was announced that judges Tsai Kuang-chih (蔡光治) and Chen Jung-ho (陳榮和) would remain in custody, while judge Lee Chun-ti (李春地) and former high court judge Fang A-sheng (房阿生) would be released on NT$2 million (US$67,000) bail and barred from leaving the country.
Tsai’s girlfriend, Huang Lai Jui-jen (黃賴瑞珍), attorney Chiu Chuang-shun (邱創舜) and his girlfriend, Tuan Mei-yueh (段美月), were also ordered to remain in detention, while prosecutor Chiu Mao-jung (邱茂榮) was released.
The court said the five defendants who remain in custody were suspected of committing serious crimes and refused to admit their crimes. Lee and Fang admitted to their crimes and asked for clemency and so they were freed on bail, it said.
The first case stems from Ho’s indictment in 2004 on charges of receiving kickbacks during a development phase of the Tongluo expansion of the Hsinchu Science Park in Miaoli County. After being convicted in 2006, Ho appealed to the Taiwan High Court and is alleged to have used bribes to secure a favorable verdict, in which he was found not guilty in May.
The second involves Fang, who is suspected of taking bribes from Chang Ping-lung (張炳龍), a former judge at the High Court’s Hualien branch, to help clear him in a trial for his 2005 corruption conviction. He was found not guilty, but a subsequent trial led to a guilty verdict, but Chang fled to China, where he remains at large.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,