The Taiwan High Court’s Tainan branch yesterday sentenced former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Tainan County council speaker Wu Chien-bao (吳健保) in a final verdict to two years in prison by for fixing professional baseball games.
The ruling followed a similar sentence by the Tainan District Court.
Tainan prosecutors said Wu would soon be informed when he is expected to start serving his sentence.
Tainan prosecutors had indicted Wu and five Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) players on charges of fixing baseball games.
Five former Chinatrust Whales players — Tseng Han-chou (曾漢州), Cheng Chang-ming (鄭昌明), Chi Chun-lin (紀俊麟), Chen Chien-wei (陳健偉) and Huang Kwei-yu (黃貴裕) — were all found not guilty in yesterday’s ruling.
The ruling said there was insufficient evidence that the five players had engaged in match-fixing with Wu.
The ruling said that beginning in 2005, Wu ran an illegal gambling business that people would use to bet on professional baseball games.
The ruling added that Wu and three La New Bears players fixed a game when the team played the Chinatrust Whales in Kaohsiung on April 28, 2007, illegally profiting NT$8,650,000 (US$286,000) from the outcome of the game.
The three La New Bears players have been indicted in a separate case.
The KMT revoked Wu’s party membership in February last year following his indictment.
Wu is an independent Greater Tainan councilor.
Left-Handed Girl (左撇子女孩), a film by Taiwanese director Tsou Shih-ching (鄒時擎) and cowritten by Oscar-winning director Sean Baker, won the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution at the Cannes Critics’ Week on Wednesday. The award, which includes a 20,000 euro (US$22,656) prize, is intended to support the French release of a first or second feature film by a new director. According to Critics’ Week, the prize would go to the film’s French distributor, Le Pacte. "A melodrama full of twists and turns, Left-Handed Girl retraces the daily life of a single mother and her two daughters in Taipei, combining the irresistible charm of
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