The Special Investigation Division (SID) of the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office yesterday said it would apply to Swiss authorities to seize US$969.75 million deposited in various Swiss banks belonging to relatives of arms dealer Andrew Wang (汪傳浦).
The SID’s plan is the latest development in a military corruption scandal involving the procurement of six Lafayette-class frigates and Dassault Mirage 2000 fighter jets from France in the 1990s.
Judicial officials yesterday began taking action in several major cases, as an amendment to the Criminal Code on the seizure of illicit gains went into effect yesterday after its passage by the legislature in December last year.
SID spokesman Kuo Wen-tung (郭文東) said the agency had applied to the Taipei District Court to seize illicit gains in Swiss bank accounts belonging to Wang and his family, which have been frozen over the past 15 years by Swiss authorities pending the outcome of judicial proceedings related to the weapons procurement scandal.
Kuo said the agency would work through an official mechanism for mutual assistance in criminal matters between Taiwan and Switzerland, which allows frozen assets in Switzerland to be released to foreign authorities if the assets are found to be of criminal origin.
Wang fled Taiwan in 1993 after the death of navy captain Yin Ching-feng (尹清楓), a key figure in the Lafayette frigate affair who was widely believed to have been murdered because he intended to reveal kickbacks from French companies to Wang and government officials.
Prior to the amendment taking effect, Taiwanese courts were unable to confiscate allegedly illegal profits without a criminal conviction and sentencing. As Wang had fled abroad, Taiwan could not seize funds in Swiss accounts that are connected to him.
Wang reportedly died in February last year in the UK at the age of 86. However, the Taiwanese government has not issued an official confirmation of his death, with some political pundits and experts investigating the Lafayette scandal speculating that Wang might have faked his death.
In a separate initiative, intellectual property officials of the Taiwan High Prosecutors’ Office have petitioned to confiscate NT$82 million (US$2.55 million) in illegal profits from Wei Chuan Foods Corp as part of ongoing judicial proceedings stemming from an adulterated cooking oil scandal in 2014, which sparked public outrage and food safety concerns.
Prosecutors filed the petition with the Intellectual Property Court, which is handling litigation against Wei Chuan executives — including former Ting Hsin International Group executive Wei Ying-chun (魏應充), who was the company’s chairman in 2014 — on charges of fraud and in terms of the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法).
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching