The Taiwan High Court on Wednesday upheld the convictions of a former Democratic Progressive Party lawmaker and a second key defendant in the 2003 Sunny Bank loan scandal, handing out prison terms and ordering the confiscation of money that it deemed illegal profits.
The scandal involved the former chairman of Sunny Bank, Chen Shen-hung (陳勝宏), a former lawmaker who is now a DPP Central Standing Committee member, and his brother-in-law Hsueh Tsung-hsien (薛宗賢).
Wednesday’s verdict sentenced Chen to 30 months in prison, fined him NT$2.2 million (US$75,549) and ordered the confiscation of NT$9.95 million.
Hsueh was sentenced to three years and six months in prison, fined NT$4 million and told to repay NT$32.65 million in illegal profits.
The verdict, which ended the second retrial of the case, can still be appealed.
The case against the two men has been winding through the court system for 12 years, with the Supreme Court twice ordering the Taiwan High Court to retry it.
Former DPP lawmaker Hsueh Ling (薛凌) was cleared in the first and second verdicts, and her not guilty verdict was finalized in 2012, with the defense saying she had not known the details of the questionable bank loans made to her younger brother.
Court documents indicate that Hsueh Tsung-hsien worked with two Sunny Bank executives to purchase the Taipei headquarters of the China Daily News, which was owned by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
The building had a price tag of more than NT$400 million, and the three men forged documents to purchase the property and to set up four dummy bank accounts, the court found, with prosecutors claiming that Hsueh Tsung-hsien had used the paperwork to conceal his relationship to his sister, who was on the bank’s board at the time.
Hsueh Tsung-hsien then applied to the bank for a NT$470 million loan.
The bank ended up giving him a total of NT$340 million through several loans.
The court found that Chen helped approve the loans during a board meeting that he presided over, despite knowing that the loans contravened Taiwan’s banking regulations, which prohibit loans to “interested parties” having close degree of family and kinship relationship.
Hsueh Tsung-hsien bought the building using the Sunny Bank loans and a NT$300 million personal loan from his sister.
Questions about the legality of the bank loans were raised by government financial regulators in 2006.
However, as Hsueh Tsung-hsien gradually repaid the bank’s loans, the initial court hearings determined that the bank had not suffered any losses from the improperly approved loans.
Taipei on Thursday held urban resilience air raid drills, with residents in one of the exercises’ three “key verification zones” reporting little to no difference compared with previous years, despite government pledges of stricter enforcement. Formerly known as the Wanan exercise, the air raid drills, which concluded yesterday, are now part of the “Urban Resilience Exercise,” which also incorporates the Minan disaster prevention and rescue exercise. In Taipei, the designated key verification zones — where the government said more stringent measures would be enforced — were Songshan (松山), Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Air raid sirens sounded at 1:30pm, signaling the
Environmental groups yesterday filed an appeal with the Executive Yuan, seeking to revoke the environmental impact assessment (EIA) conditionally approved in February for the Hsieh-ho Power Plant’s planned fourth liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving station off the coast of Keelung. The appeal was filed jointly by the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group, the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association and the Keelung City Taiwan Head Cultural Association, which together held a news conference outside the Executive Yuan in Taipei. Explaining the reasons for the appeal, Wang Hsing-chih (王醒之) of the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group said that the EIA failed to address
The number of people who reported a same-sex spouse on their income tax increased 1.5-fold from 2020 to 2023, while the overall proportion of taxpayers reporting a spouse decreased by 4.4 percent from 2014 to 2023, Ministry of Finance data showed yesterday. The number of people reporting a spouse on their income tax trended upward from 2014 to 2019, the Department of Statistics said. However, the number decreased in 2020 and 2021, likely due to a drop in marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic and the income of some households falling below the taxable threshold, it said. The number of spousal tax filings rebounded
A saleswoman, surnamed Chen (陳), earlier this month was handed an 18-month prison term for embezzling more than 2,000 pairs of shoes while working at a department store in Tainan. The Tainan District Court convicted Chen of embezzlement in a ruling on July 7, sentencing her to prison for illegally profiting NT$7.32 million (US$248,929) at the expense of her employer. Chen was also given the opportunity to reach a financial settlement, but she declined. Chen was responsible for the sales counter of Nike shoes at Tainan’s Shinkong Mitsukoshi Zhongshan branch, where she had been employed since October 2019. She had previously worked
RSS