Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) yesterday appealed to the Control Yuan, accusing prosecutors of engaging in a “selective investigation” and malicious prosecution in a corruption case in which Lu was found not guilty.
Lu said she would like to highlight two episodes of misconduct by the Supreme Prosecutors Office’s Special Investigation Division (SID), saying the division’s selective investigations only went after pan-green camp officials and violated the principle of presumption of innocence, adding that its prosecution cases were malicious.
The SID ignored hundreds of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) officials who were also involved in controversial lawsuits and opted to go after Democratic Progressive Party politicians, the former vice president said.
Lu and former Presidential Office secretary-general Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃) were found not guilty on July 2 by the Taipei District Court of using fraudulent receipts to claim state affairs funds during their stint in the Presidential Office, almost five years after they were charged.
A separate case in which Lu, Yu and former foreign minister Mark Chen (陳唐山) were charged with using fraudulent receipts to claim special allowance funds were also dropped on the same day, with the district court saying that an amendment approved last year by the legislature stipulates that no officials would be prosecuted for suspicious reimbursements from special allowance funds that took place before Dec. 31, 2006.
Lu said the appeal was filed not only on her behalf, but for the 6,500 government officials involved in the cases, a by-product of the longstanding political division between the pan-blue and pan-green camps.
Citing statistics compiled by the Ministry of Justice, Lu said the conviction rate for corruption-related cases as of December last year was 60.8 percent, which means that “40 percent of those who were indicted were eventually proved innocent, but not before lengthy, painful and expensive legal proceedings.”
It is unprecedented in the history of the Constitution of the Republic of China for a former vice president to submit such an appeal, Control Yuan member Huang Huang-hsiung (黃煌雄) said, adding that the Control Yuan would cautiously deal with the appeal.
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,