At the first hearing in the Taipei District Court yesterday of former Executive Yuan secretary-general Lin Yi-shih’s (林益世) corruption case, Lin wept while denying the charges and said his role in the case had been in service of the people and that a recording used against him had been tampered with.
The case against Lin started on June 27, when a local magazine reported that he helped Kaohsiung-based Ti Yung Co (地勇選礦公司) to secure a slag treatment contract from a subsidiary of China Steel Corp (CSC) in 2010, when Lin served as a legislator of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
In return, Ti Yung Co owner Chen Chi-hsiang (陳啟祥) gave Lin NT$63 million (US$2.1 million), the indictment said.
Chen handed prosecutors two recordings of Lin allegedly negotiating with him about bribes, after his company allegedly failed to renew its slag treatment contract with the CSC subsidiary because he refused Lin’s request for a further bribe, according to prosecutors.
On Oct. 25, the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office Special Investigation Division (SID) indicted Lin on charges of demanding bribes, accepting bribes, concealing illegal gains and keeping unaccountable assets.
During the court hearing yesterday, presiding judge Chi Kai-feng (紀凱峰) said that aside from the charges brought against Lin by the SID, Lin may also have violated the Anti-Corruption Act (貪汙治罪條例) and the Criminal Code by allegedly taking advantage of his position as a government official to ask for a bribe through intimidation.
Though society has condemned Lin, the court should avoid tyranny of the majority and treat the issue according to the law, using the principles of nulla poena sine lege (Latin for “no penalty without a law”) and presumption of innocence when judging the case, Chi said.
Lin burst into tears upon hearing the statement and denied all the charges, saying that he had never thought of accepting bribes or had done anything that would go against the principles of his office. He denied that he had asked for bribes of NT$83 million.
Lin said he facilitated the deal between Ti Yung and the CSC subsidiary because one of his primary supporters, Kuo Jen-tsai (郭人才), had asked him to “help the voters.”
Chen offered the NT$63 million of his own initiative, Lin said, adding that the tape Chen had provided had been edited and was not the entirety of their conversation.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater