Judicial Reform Foundation (JRF) executive director Lin Feng-jeng (林峰正) yesterday called on Prosecutor Evaluation Committee Chairman Hung Tai-wen (洪泰文) to refrain from taking part in the possible investigation of two prosecutors allegedly involved in improper lobbying for the sake of impartiality.
The Supreme Prosecutors’ Office Special Investigation Division (SID) has referred High Prosecutors’ Office prosecutors Chen Shou-huang (陳守煌) and Lin Shiow-tao (林秀濤) to the Ministry of Justice’s committee for investigation.
Chen stands accused of allegedly pressing Lin not to appeal the non-guilty verdict given to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) in a breach of trust case at the request of then-minister of justice Tseng Yung-fu (曾勇夫) and Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平).
Hung should not handle the probes into Chen and Lin Shiow-tao because he was subordinate to Prosecutor-General Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘), who has been aggressively pursuing the improper lobbying allegations, Lin Feng-jeng said.
Meanwhile, a senior prosecutor said that the SID’s wiretapping of Lin Shiow-tao and her daughter was an obvious violation of the law and has jeopardized the credibility of the nation’s prosecutorial system.
The Liberty Times, the Taipei Times’, sister newspaper, yesterday cited a Greater Taichung senior prosecutor as saying that the division had no basis upon which to have wiretapped Lin and her 12-year-old daughter’s cell phones.
The unnamed prosecutor said there have been previous incidents in which prosecutors have been deposed for abusing their positions to engage in improper wiretapping and if a top prosecutor does the same, the whole judicial system could collapse.
Huang came under fire over claims that the SID expanded its wiretap in case No. 61, filed in 2011 to wiretap all suspects in a judges’ bribery case in 2010, to wiretap targets unrelated to the case, including Lin Shiow-tao and her 12-year-old daughter.
The Greater Taichung prosecutor said the division suspected Lin Shiow-tao had received Chen’s request to not appeal Ker’s case to the Supreme Court.
However, it had not found any irregular or suspicious actions that showed that she had received a bribe in exchange for acquiescing to the request, making it impossible to justify the SID wiretap since there was no proof that Lin Shiow-tao had broken the law.
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,