Prosecutors said yesterday they would pursue the family of a man accused of reaping hundreds of millions of dollars from a controversial French arms deal more than two decades ago, even after he died this year.
Andrew Wang (汪傳浦) was indicted on corruption charges in 2006 over his involvement in a slush fund linked to a US$2.8 billion contract to buy six Lafayette-class warships in 1991.
Wang was put on the most-wanted list after he and his family fled the nation shortly before the scandal broke in 1993. He died from an illness in London in January at the age of 87, officials said.
“We will drop the charges against Wang since he has passed away, but we will continue to seek the return of the ill-gotten funds in Wang’s case from Switzerland,” Supreme Prosecutors’ Office Special Investigation Division spokesman Kuo Wen-tung (郭文東) said.
The funds are in various bank accounts in the names of Wang’s wife and children, who were also indicted in the case, and they have been frozen by Swiss authorities pending legal preceedings in Taiwan, Kuo said.
The Supreme Court found that Wang solicited and received about US$340 million in kickbacks from French defense company Thomson-CSF (now Thales) over the frigate deal. His accomplice, former navy captain Kuo Li-heng (郭力恆), served a 20-year prison sentence for accepting bribes to facilitate the deal.
Allegations of backhanders emerged after the body of an officer who ran the navy’s weapons acquisitions office was found floating in the sea off the east coast in 1993.
Investigators believe naval captain Yin Ching-feng (尹清楓) was murdered because he was ready to blow the whistle on rampant corruption in the military — including the Lafayette deal.
A French judicial probe opened in 2001 to investigate claims that much of the money paid went on commissions to Taiwanese middlemen, politicians and military officers, as well as in China and France.
Taiwan concluded in the same year that as much as US$400 million in bribes may have been paid throughout the course of the deal.
In 2011, Taiwan received US$875 million from Thales, after the company lost an appeal over wrongful payments of commissions in the frigate deal.
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
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