The New Taipei District Court yesterday approved an arrest warrant for a man who skipped bail while under indictment for allegedly marketing counterfeit Rosuvastatin (also known as Crestor), a cholesterol-reducing drug.
Pan Chun-ta (潘駿達), 40, on Thursday failed to appear for a trial hearing and did not report to police, prosecutors said.
Pan allegedly made about NT$69 million (US$2.3 million) over two years by making and selling counterfeit versions of the drug, prosecutors said.
Pan colluded with three others to import materials from China to produce counterfeit Rosuvastatin at a facility in New Taipei City’s Sijhih District (汐止) starting in 2015, they said.
After being charged with contravening the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act (藥事法), he was in February released on NT$1 million bail.
Bailiffs on Thursday inquired into Pan’s whereabouts and found that he had failed to report to Sijhih police once a month.
The case was the second this month in which a local police unit failed to alert judicial authorities about a suspect breaking the terms of their bail agreement.
Earlier this month, Ching Fu Shipbuilding Co vice chairman Chen Wei-chih (陳偉志) failed to appear for trial and is suspected of having fled Taiwan to evade prosecution.
Chen’s father, company chairman Chen Ching-nan (陳慶男), was later detained after failing to pay his NT$100 million bail.
Prosecutors have charged the Chens with fraud, breaches of trust and contravening the Banking Act (銀行法) by using forged documents to obtain a NT$20.5 billion syndicated loan from nine domestic lenders in 2016.
Chen Wei-chih was ordered to report daily to Kaohsiung police, but he had not done so since May 5, city court officials said.
Prosecutors in New Taipei City and Kaohsiung said they would investigate to determine if local police were negligent or colluded with the defendants.
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
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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