Prosecutors on Thursday indicted former Pingtung Council councilor Wang Hsi-chan (王新展) for illegally operating a business on a plot of public land under government administration in Pingtung’s Liuchiu Township (琉球).
The case has received attention because 66-year-old Wang is the father-in-law of Taiwan’s highest-paid baseball player, Lin Chih-sheng (林智勝), also known as Ngayaw Ake.
From 2014, Wang allegedly occupied a plot of public land overseen by the Ministry of Finance’s National Property Administration, on which he built and operated a bed-and-breakfast establishment, the Pingtung District Prosecutors’ Office said.
Local authorities had received complaints and ordered Wang to close the business, the prosecutors said, adding that authorities had over the past three years sent Wang official fine notifications.
Pingtung County Government officials said Wang contravened local building bylaws and breached the Act for the Development of Tourism (觀光發展條例).
Prosecutors are asking the court to impose a fine of NT$2.96 million (US$99,879) for deemed business revenue from January 2015 to September last year.
Wang yesterday said he was innocent of the charges, that his business was built on private land.
He only did landscaping work on the public land to help protect a section of hill and a grassy field, Wang added.
Married to Wang’s daughter in 2005, Lin plays baseball on the Brothers Baseball Club and has the nickname “Big Brother” (大師兄).
Taking advantage of Lin’s fame as a baseball player, Wang named the bed-and-breakfast establishment Big Brother’s Seascape Tourist Lodging (大師兄海景小棧), thus attracting tourists and baseball fans to the business.
After several outstanding seasons with the Lamigo Monkeys baseball team and being named the Chinese Professional Baseball League’s Most Valuable Player in 2015, Lin signed a contract with the Brothers in January 2016, becoming Taiwan’s highest paid player with a guaranteed NT$45 million three-year contract, including NT$9 million in incentives.
However, Lin has been embroiled in several scandals of his own, including those for his alleged late-night partying and drinking, which breached the baseball club’s rules.
He has reportedly also led teammates in insubordination, challenging the authority of American head coach Cory Snyder.
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:
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