Former Taiwan Sugar Corp (Taisugar) chairman Wu Nai-jen (吳乃仁) and former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator Hong Chi-chang (洪奇昌) said they would appeal a court ruling handed down by the Taichung District Court on Wednesday which sentenced Wu to three years, 10 months and Hong to two years, four months in prison for breach of trust under the Criminal Code.
A senior executive of Chun Lung Co, surnamed Pan (潘), was sentenced to three years, four months in prison on the same charges.
Wu, who was chairman of Taisugar in 2003, was charged with accepting Hong’s request that Chun Lung Co, a land development firm, be given the right to purchase a plot of land it was renting from Taisugar in Wu Feng Industrial Park, Taichung.
As chairman of a state-owned enterprise, Wu was accused of carrying out the real-estate sale without consulting the Ministry of Economic Affairs and allowing Chun Lung Co to purchase the land at a price much lower than the market value.
Investigations by Taisugar revealed that Wu sold the plot of agricultural land for about NT$600 million (US$20.5 million), reportedly NT$200 million short of the market value at the time. The sale consequently damaged Taisugar’s financial position.
Wu rejected the charges, saying the sale was completed six months after he had left Taisugar and that he was not the main individual responsible for the deal. Moreover, Wu said, Taisugar reviews tenders every six months and the sale was allowed to go ahead as planned and the price was not changed when the sale was reviewed.
Hong also denied the charges against him, saying he had only taken Pan to Taisugar once and that he had not interfered in the real-estate deal.
Both Wu and Hong said that they would appeal their convictions.
Another former government official, Lai Ying-hsi (賴英錫), a former director-general of the then-Taichung County Government’s Construction Bureau, was sentenced to eight years in prison on corruption charges for receiving a total of NT$1.4 million from Chun Lung.
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,