Since he was released on bail, former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) has not publicly urged his former secretary Hsu Chih-yu (許芷瑜) to return to Taiwan to clarify details about the corruption scandal he faces. Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) has not called for her to return either.
The TPP only shouts about judicial persecution while disregarding the law. As a legislator himself, Huang is leading the TPP’s young supporters to challenge the seriousness of the judiciary.
Former representative to Japan Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), who is President William Lai’s (賴清德) senior adviser, recently compared the Taiwanese judicial system with Japan’s, saying it was like comparing apples with oranges. The guilty plea rate among corrupt officials in Japan is rather high, while in Taiwan such officials prefer to lie and destroy evidence.
However, when offenders in Taiwan plead guilty, the rate of conviction is 99.9 percent, the same as Japan’s.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office says it has enough evidence to prove that Ko took money he should not have — although it has yet to find out where the cash went. It says there was likely a quid pro quo to increase the floor area ratio of the Core Pacific City project, which is why Ko has been indicted.
The alleged behavior meets the definition of corruption and acceptance of bribes.
Perhaps Ko’s supporters could check the statements of Shao Hsiu-pei (邵琇珮), the executive secretary of the Taipei Urban Planning Commission, who was forced to break the law after seeing Ko during his time as Taipei mayor bully disobedient civil servants by threatening that they would “never be hired again.”
After reading the indictment, Huang has bullied the judiciary, challenged the rule of law and besmirched the public’s intelligence. He is the most despicable character in this situation.
Chu Meng-hsiang is a former deputy secretary-general of the Lee Teng-hui Foundation.
Translated by Eddy Chang
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS