Three officials, including former Taoyuan Department of Economic Planning director Chu Sung-wei (朱松偉), are being investigated on suspicion of receiving bribes and rigging bids to help companies secure contracts, prosecutors said yesterday.
The three have been implicated in a corruption probe on public tender contracts for the “Asian Silicon Valley” project.
Chu, 53, was detained, while Sun Yu (孫瑀), 60, chairman of Sunsky International Ltd (全徽道安科技) and Taiwan Turing Co (台灣智慧駕駛), was released on bail of NT$500,000, and his associate, Huang Chung-sheng (黃仲勝), 62, was released on bail of NT$200,000.
A civil engineering professor, Chu was allegedly among Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan’s (鄭文燦) inner circle of officials and advisers when he led the department from June 2016 to December last year.
Chu was also deputy executive secretary for the Asia Silicon Valley Development Agency when the high-tech hub project was launched in December 2016 by the central government.
Agency officials worked to attract investment from start-ups and established companies that develop Internet of Things, smart machinery, automation, smart transportation, biotech, green energy, aviation and defense technologies.
Prosecutors said that in 2017 and last year, Chu demanded bribes from Sun and his officials for support in their bids to develop driverless buses and other automated vehicles for smart transportation projects, which Sun’s companies specialize in.
Prosecutors said they uncovered bundles of cash at Chu’s home, which they suspected were portions of the bribe money. Chu has denied the allegations.
Cheng said that he has reminded all city officials that he has zero tolerance for corruption and promised that the city government would fully cooperate with the investigation.
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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