The Kaohsiung branch of the Taiwan High Court yesterday upheld the conviction of former legislator Yu Ling-ya (余玲雅), issuing a nine-month sentence on a breach-of-trust charge for arranging to use school money to pay an office assistant.
Yu, 67, was last year given a two-year jail sentence by the Kaohsiung Ciaotou District Court.
Yu appealed the ruling to the High Court, which ruled that because she had cooperated with investigators and returned the money to the school, the sentence would be reduced to a nine-month prison term.
The decision was final and cannot be appealed.
Yu won legislative elections twice, representing the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) for districts in what was then Kaohsiung County from 1993 to 1999.
When Yu was chairwoman of Kao Yuan Technology College in 1988, she was accused of transferring money from the college to pay the salary of her office assistant, surnamed Huang (黃).
Investigators said that the payments continued until 2006 and totaled about NT$6 million (US$196,361) over the period.
Prosecutors charged Yu with breach of trust, saying she listed Huang as an employee of the college and paid the salary from the school’s budget, despite knowing that Huang was working in her personal office.
Yu is the granddaughter of former Kaohsiung County commissioner Yu Deng-fa (余登發), a prominent independent political leader of southern Taiwan who opposed the then-one-party rule of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) during the Martial Law era.
Yu Deng-fa is well known as the patriarch of the Yu family, a powerful political force for the DPP in southern Taiwan, which also included his daughter-in-law, Yu Chen Yueh-ying (余陳月瑛) — a Kaohsiung County commissioner from 1985 to 1993 — and grandson, former minister of the interior Yu Cheng-hsien (余政憲).
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