Former Nantou County Council speaker Wu Chih-hsiang (吳棋祥) was yesterday sentenced to six years in prison in a final verdict on corruption charges.
Nantou prosecutors charged Wu with violating the Anti-Corruption Act (貪污治罪條例) by abusing his official office to extort property.
Wu also had his civil rights suspended for four years.
Wu, a member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), will be summoned to start his jail term soon, prosecutors said.
Wu’s family runs a concrete company in the county.
In 2006, because the price of sandstone, which is mixed with cement to make concrete, was rising, Wu wanted to buy land from a sandstone quarrying operator to help lower the cost of procuring the material.
The Supreme Court ruling said that in April 2007, Tseng met with a female representative from a quarry surnamed Huang, during which he asked her to sell him land at about half the normal price.
The court found Wu threatened the woman by saying he knew she had bribed the county government so that her company could quarry stone for longer than was typically allowed and that she had quarried materials from beyond the county boundary.
The ruling said because Huang refused to sell the land to Wu, he instructed a weekly magazine published by the council to run a story about her company’s alleged illegal quarrying.
Wu also pressured the county government to launch an investigation into Huang’s company, the ruling said.
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
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