Biotech firm Zodic Light World Technology Inc (兆良科技) chairman Hubert Lo (羅栩亮) has been indicted on fraud charges after selling shares that netted him NT$250 million (US$7.69 million), the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said on Friday.
Lo and 18 alleged accomplices, including an accountant, have been charged for violating Taiwan’s Securities and Exchange Act (證券交易法), the Company Act (公司法) and other local laws, prosecutors said.
Lo and three of the alleged accomplices have been detained since they were arrested in June.
National media have dubbed the case the Taiwanese Wolf of Wall Street, a 2013 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which was based on a true story about a stock broker’s rise and fall his involvement in crime and corruption.
Zodic described itself as a provider of minimally invasive abdominal surgery devices, but after a raid on Zodic’s headquarters and Lo’s affiliates in June, prosecutors said they found that the company was a shell firm and did not own any production facilities.
In June, Lo told reporters that the company had signed a memorandum of understanding with Chirana Group of Europe, Taipei Medical University and Honduras to cooperate on a three-year investment project worth 500 million euros (US$551 million) to penetrate the Latin American market.
In addition, Lo said Zodic was invited to attend a medical equipment exhibition held in Dusseldorf in 2013 and secured 1 million euros in orders.
However, Lo allegedly falsified information about the three-year deal and the orders placed at the Dusseldorf trade show create a false projection of Zodic’s outlook.
Lo then started to sell shares in the company to the public for his own profit and also asked his employees to subscribe to the company’s shares, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said that Lo and his accomplices pocketed about NT$250 million in shares sales.
UNDER WATCH: Taiwan will have to establish a standardized nucleic acid testing method to identify the virus and monitor its spread, the CDC said The Langya henipavirus, which can be transmitted from animals to humans, has been discovered in China, with 35 human infections reported so far, Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said, adding that the nation would establish a nucleic acid testing method to identify the virus. A study titled “A Zoonotic Henipavirus in Febrile Patients in China” that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday said that a new henipavirus associated with a fever-causing human illness was identified in China. The study said an investigation identified 35 patients with acute infection of the Langya henipavirus in China’s Shandong
‘ORDINARY PEOPLE’: A man watching Taiwanese military drills said that there would be nothing anyone could do if the situation escalates in the Taiwan Strait Many people in Taiwan look upon China’s military exercises over the past week with calm resignation, doubting that war is imminent and if anything, feeling pride in their nation’s determination to defend itself. After a visit to Taiwan last week by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, China has sent ships and aircraft across an unofficial buffer between Taiwan and China’s coast and missiles over Taipei and into waters surrounding the nation since Thursday last week. However, Rosa Chang, proudly watching her son take part in Taiwanese military exercises that included dozens of howitzers firing shells into the Taiwan Strait off
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old
ON THE ALERT: The daily caseload will rise, but it is not likely to reach the level of the previous peak of about 80,000 to 90,000, the deputy minister of health said Reporting nine new local cases of the Omicron subvariant BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday said that the BA.5 strain is gradually spreading in northern Taiwan and was expected to cause a wave of infections in one or two weeks. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director-General Chou Jih-haw (周志浩), head of the CECC’s disease surveillance division, said 15,206 new local COVID-19 infections, 206 imported cases and 26 deaths were confirmed. The local caseload was the lowest in 100 days — since 15,033 cases were reported on April 30 — and the number of deaths was the lowest in
RSS