Former Ting Hsin Oil and Fat Industrial Co chairman Wei Ying-chun (魏應充) has been sentenced to five years and nine months in prison for his involvement in a 2014 tainted cooking oil scandal in the final ruling in the case.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected Wei’s appeal of an April ruling by the High Court’s Taichung branch.
It confirmed 26 charges against him and sentenced him to jail terms for seven of them, while ruling that the punishments for the rest were commutable to fines.
It also ordered a retrial on 45 other charges against him.
The Supreme Court also confirmed the guilty verdicts for three former executives of Ting Hsin and its affiliates — Chang Mei-feng (常梅峰), Chen Mao-chia (陳茂嘉) and Yang Chen-yi (楊振益) — on charges of fraud and contravention of the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法) and sentenced them to jail terms of varying lengths.
The High Court in April had overturned a not guilty verdict for Wei and sentenced him to 15 years in jail for his part in the scandal, in which his company was accused of selling lard-based cooking oil products containing gutter oil and imported oil meant for animal feed.
In the April ruling, the three executives were handed jail terms of varying lengths, while Ting Hsin was fined NT$250 million (US$8.22 million) for its role in the scandal.
After Wednesday’s verdict, one of Wei’s attorneys, Yu Ming-hsien (余明賢), said that his client will file a motion for a retrial and an extraordinary appeal.
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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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