After being declared not guilty after a years-long corruption trial, the case against former National Science Council official Shieh Ching-jyh (謝清志) is now considered closed after prosecutors on Friday said they would not appeal the sentence with the Supreme Court.
Shieh is one of the few government officials from the former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration who has been charged with corruption, but finally acquitted after years of trial.
Ten defendants, including Shieh and Hsu Hung-chang (許鴻章), owner of Sheus Technologies Corp — also known as Hung Hua Engineering — were indicted in December 2006 on corruption charges after Sheus won an NT$8.05 billion (US$262 million) construction tender to reduce the vibrations caused by the high-speed rail as it passes through the Southern Taiwan Science Park.
High-tech companies with operations in the park, such as chip manufacturers, are affected by vibrations above 48 decibels.
The Tainan District Court found Shieh not guilty in August 2008, and after Tainan prosecutors appealed the ruling with the High Court’s Tainan branch, the branch again acquitted Shieh in June of 2010.
Prosecutors then appealed the case with the Supreme Court, and the top judicial authority ordered the High Court’s Tainan branch to retry the case. On July 11, the Tainan branch found Shieh not guilty for a second time. This time, prosecutors said they would not appeal the case, therefore the verdict finding Shieh innocent is final.
All rulings in the five-and-a-half years of trials found Shieh innocent because of insufficient evidence to prove his guilt.
Liu Jung-tang (劉榮堂), a spokesman for the Tainan Prosecutors’ Office, said on Friday that prosecutors had found no legal grounds to bring the case to the Supreme Court again.
Shieh, who said the charges were politically motivated to discredit the DPP administration, added that although the case was closed, the damage and insult could not be erased.
Shieh, said he would file a wrongful imprisonment compensation lawsuit.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS