Prosecutors on Wednesday obtained a district court’s permission to detain Liu Yuan-chung (劉遠忠), director of Cingjing Farm in Nantou County and a decorated military veteran, on suspicion of accepting kickbacks from contractors.
Liu and another suspect, believed to be a middleman, are accused of soliciting bribes from construction companies contracted by the leisure farm that is operated by the Veterans Affairs Commission.
The Nantou District Court said Liu, who has served as director of the farm since 2010, was suspected of having taken bribes in violation of the Anti-Corruption Act (貪汙治罪條例).
The court ordered that Liu and the other suspect, a construction company overseer identified only by the surname Lin, be held incommunicado because they were likely to collude on testimony and might try to flee the country.
Last year, the popular leisure farm in the central Taiwan undertook renovation and landscaping works. Investigators from the Agency Against Corruption found that Liu, a retired air force major general, may have accepted more than NT$3 million (US$103,135) in kickbacks from the contractors. Prosecutors raided Liu’s living quarters on Tuesday and seized NT$1 million in cash that was believed to be part of the kickbacks he had allegedly received.
Liu was held for questioning overnight and prosecutors later sought the court’s permission to detain him and Lin on bribery charges.
The minimum penalty for the crime is five years in jail, the court said.
Liu, who was the leader of the Air Force’s 443rd Tactical Fighter Wing, was decorated in 1990 for flying a crippled fighter away from a heavily populated area in southern Taiwan and out to sea before ejecting from the aircraft, according to military sources.
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
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,
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