Two legislative committees yesterday passed an amendment that would deal harshly with game--fixing in Taiwan’s professional baseball league, the latest effort to eradicate gambling and game rigging that have plagued the sport since 1996.
The draft amendment, which would revise the Sports Lottery Issue Act (運動彩券發行條例), calls for jail terms ranging from three to 10 years and fines of up to NT$50 million (US$1.66 million) for collective game-fixing involving more than three people.
For individual offenses, anybody convicted of game-fixing could face up to seven years in jail and a fine of between NT$10 million and NT$30 million, according to the bill jointly passed by the Education and Culture Committee and Finance Committee. It must still pass a second and third reading in the legislature before becoming law.
Legislators called for the harsher punishments to replace amendments proposed by the Executive Yuan that they felt were “too lenient” and unlikely to solve the persistent problem.
In the amendment the Executive Yuan approved on April 1, individuals found guilty of fixing professional baseball games would be subject to a jail term of less than five years and fines of up to NT$10 million.
Game-fixing scandals have nearly caused the demise of Taiwan’s Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL), repeatedly challenging fans’ loyalty to the country’s national sport.
At its peak in the mid-1990s, league games drew an average of more than 6,000 fans, but in recent years average attendances have ranged between 1,000 and 2,000.
All four CPBL clubs said they welcomed the proposed legislation. Su Ching-hsuan (蘇敬軒), the La New Bears president, said the harsher sentences would be an effective deterrent to game-fixing.
Brother Elephants president Yang Ai-hua (楊愛華), whose team was ravaged by a game-fixing scandal last year, said: “What we have hoped for has finally arrived.”
Yang said that if the amendment were passed into law, he hoped it would be enforced effectively and that law enforcement would deal with future suspects impartially.
CPBL secretary-general Wayne Lee (李文彬) also said that “the law must be observed and enforced completely.”
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:
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