The Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland has ruled in favor of freezing the bank accounts of Andrew Wang (汪傳浦), the Taiwanese arms broker implicated in a corruption scandal dating back to the 1991 procurement of Lafayette-class frigates from France, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official said yesterday.
The ministry in Taipei said the Swiss court turned down an appeal filed by Wang against a decision by the European nation’s Federal Department of Justice and Police to freeze his accounts. The ruling is final, it added.
Swiss authorities have frozen about US$700 million in bank accounts belonging to Wang and former navy captain Kuo Li-heng (郭力恆) since 2001 at the request of Taiwanese judicial authorities.
They have agreed to send the funds to Taiwan once a final verdict in the corruption case has been made.
The corruption and bribery case stems from a 1991 deal for the navy to buy six Lafayette-class frigates from French company Thomson-CSF, now renamed Thales SA, for an inflated price of US$2.8 billion.
The price included procurement kickbacks and bribes to facilitate the purchase.
In April, the Supreme Court sentenced Kuo to 15 years in prison for accepting US$17.6 million in kickbacks from Wang relating to the frigate deal. The court also demanded the return of US$340 million in illicit gains frozen in foreign bank accounts.
The latest ruling by the Swiss Supreme Court means Taiwan has now moved one step closer to retrieving the long-delayed funds.
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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