The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its former chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday questioned prosecutors and the Control Yuan over their handling of a fresh round of lawsuits probing the Yu Chang Biologics Co (宇昌生技股份有限公司) case.
Speaking through her office yesterday, Tsai urged the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office Special Investigation Division (SID) to approach the lawsuits with the same standard with which it had handled other cases and said it should not conduct “selective investigations.”
Tsai, who was accused of illegal involvement in the formation of Yu Chang while serving as vice premier in 2007, filed a lawsuit to the SID on Monday against Vice President Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) and the former Council for Economic Planning and Development minister Christina Liu (劉憶如) after the Taipei District Court cleared her of any wrongdoing.
The SID handed the case to the Taipei Prosecutors’ Office on Thursday, saying the case was out of its jurisdiction.The case had been passed to the SID because it was the division’s “unavoidable obligation” to launch investigations into the possible abuse of state apparatus for unfair election campaigning by the president or vice president, the former DPP presidential candidate said.
The SID thoughtlessly handed the case back to the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office despite kowing that the office had closed the case, she added.
Meanwhile, DPP Chairman Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) said yesterday that he would not attend an interview requested by the Control Yuan, which said it would continue with an administrative investigation into the Yu Chang case despite Tsai having been cleared of any criminality.
Su, who was summoned because he was premier in 2007, said the Control Yuan had informed him that the interview would be “confidential,” but he said it was being turned into a “media show,” with Control Yuan members repeatedly leaking information to the media.
Su “has decided not to appear at the show and could not care less if his absence led to impeachment or a censure,” DPP spokesperson Wang Ming-shen (王閔生) quoted Su as saying. The final results of the investigation have still not been announced eight months later and the Control Yuan should have held government officials who were involved in the mudslinging case accountable to save its “fading credibility,” Wang also quoted Su as saying.
According to SID spokesperson Chen Hung-ta (陳宏達), the SID is in charge of investigating corruption cases involving officials above Cabinet level, and does not handle cases related to the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Act (總統副總統選舉罷免法).
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:
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