The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday said there is no fixed timetable on when it would begin prosecution of 24 major lawsuits filed against former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
Ma, who lost his presidential immunity after stepping down on Friday last week, might face 24 lawsuits ranging from corruption to leaking state secrets, illegal use of state funds, failure to declare assets and financial irregularities in public projects.
Officials from the Taipei office said there is no fixed timetable on the prosecution process, because each of the 24 lawsuits are being handled independently and the progress of each case depends on the prosecutors in charge of them.
Officials said that judicial probes have been reopened on the cases against Ma after his term ended and a team of 10 prosecutors have been reviewing evidence and other materials in preparation for pretrial procedures.
Through his eight-year presidential term, Ma has been embroiled in many controversies, which have led to a total of 300 lawsuits being filed against him.
Prosecutors decided not to press charges, citing insufficient evidence, or dropped charges on 276 of the cases, leaving 24 major lawsuits.
Among the most prominent of the lawsuits is the Taipei Dome case in which Ma is accused of illegally profiting Farglory Group (遠雄集團) by agreeing to reduce the firm’s property royalties to zero for the project at a secret meeting with company chairman Chao Teng-hsiung (趙藤雄).
Ma is also accused of leaking state secrets during the political turmoil in September 2013, when he allegedly passed on information to then-prosecutor-general Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘), gathered through telephone wiretaps in an investigation into possible financial irregularities by then-legislative speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平).
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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