The Control Yuan on Tuesday voted 12-1 to impeach Nantou District prosecutor Lin Tien-lin (林天麟) amid allegations of bribery and for carrying on an extramarital affair.
The impeachment motion, initiated by Control Yuan members Liu Yu-shan (劉玉山) and Tu Shan-liang, (杜善良) has been referred to the Public Functionary Disciplinary Sanction Commission for deliberation.
Based on their investigation, the two Control Yuan members said Lin had broken several regulations, such as the Civil Servants Work Act (公務員服務法) and the Prosecutors Code (檢察官守則).
They accused him of conspiring with former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Ho Chih-hui (何智輝), who was charged with multiple cases of corruption by the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office in 2007 and 2008.
They also accused Lin of having an extramarital affair and said his conduct had “severely tarnished the image of prosecutors.”
Lin may be discharged from his post — the severest form of punishment in cases like this, the government watchdog members said.
They alleged that Ho had asked former Taiwan High Court judge Tsai Kuang-chih (蔡光治) to ask Lin to intervene and lobby prosecutors in a bid to dodge a judicial investigation.
The pair said Lin had agreed to the request and colluded with Tsai, who lived nearby, using the code “taking out the garbage” to meet and exchange information on the judicial probe.
Lin’s action came to light during a clean-up campaign launched by the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office Special Investigation Division (SID) to rid the nation of corrupt judges, the two Control Yuan members said.
They said that evidence collected by the SID and the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office showed that Lin, Tsai and Ho had met 10 times at Cosmos Hotel in Taipei.
They said that although Lin had made several attempts to lobby the prosecution, the “upright character” of the prosecutor in charge of the investigation deterred Lin from making actual contact.
Ho’s attempts to bribe a number of judges broke out in July 2010 and came under media spotlight.
When questioned about Ho, Lin claimed to have little knowledge of Ho’s involvement in multiple bribery cases, despite the wide media coverage it received, the Control Yuan members said.
The Control Yuan posted the impeachment motion on its Web site on Tuesday morning, instead of holding a press conference.
Asked about public concern over the way it released the information, Liu said the Control Yuan did not hold a press conference on the impeachment motion because her schedule was full.
Translated by Stacy Hsu, Staff writer
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