Swiss authorities on Wednesday returned US$34 million in frozen bank deposits to Taiwan that were believed to be kickbacks connected to the purchase of six Lafayette-class frigates from France in 1991, Swiss officials said.
Officials at the Swiss Department of Justice said the funds belonged to two different account holders but declined to identify them, saying only that one of them was a Taiwanese official.
The officials said that according to Switzerland's Federal Act on International Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters, frozen capital assets can be released to foreign governments if they are related to criminal activities.
The funds were handed over to Taiwanese officials on the condition that legal proceedings against the two people concerned would comply with human rights principles, they said.
The sum is part of a total of US$520 million that Taiwan has sought to recover from a number of frozen Swiss bank accounts belonging to several Taiwanese involved in the scandal, including fugitive arms dealer Andrew Wang (
Proceedings for the retrieval of the remaining funds are ongoing, the officials said.
Kickbacks
Wang was a Taiwanese agent for French arms supplier Thompson-CSF. He fled the country following the death of Navy Captain Yin Ching-feng (尹清楓) under suspicious circumstances in late 1993. It is believed that Yin was poised to blow the whistle on colleagues who had received kickbacks from the Lafayette deal.
Wang has been wanted by Taiwanese prosecutors on a murder charge since September 2000.
Concluding a second-phase investigation into the arms procurement scandal in September last year, a special judicial panel in Taiwan indicted Wang and his wife, Yeh Hsiu-chen (葉秀貞), as well as their four children and the Kuo brothers on charges of collecting kickbacks from the Lafayette deal.
According to the indictment, the Wangs opened more than 60 bank accounts in Europe and Asia to launder US$520 million in illicit gains from the deal.
Taiwan began to seek assistance from the Swiss government in 2001 to retrieve funds frozen in several Swiss banks.
Through a judicial aid agreement with Switzerland, Taiwanese prosecutors acquired a collection of bank files from a Swiss federal judge in November 2005. After nearly 10 months of examination of the files, Taiwan petitioned in September last year for the return of US$520 million from a total of US$730 million frozen in the Swiss banks.
Additional reporting by AP
CROSS-STRAIT COLLABORATION: The new KMT chairwoman expressed interest in meeting the Chinese president from the start, but she’ll have to pay to get in Beijing allegedly agreed to let Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) around the Lunar New Year holiday next year on three conditions, including that the KMT block Taiwan’s arms purchases, a source said yesterday. Cheng has expressed interest in meeting Xi since she won the KMT’s chairmanship election in October. A source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a consensus on a meeting was allegedly reached after two KMT vice chairmen visited China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Director Song Tao (宋濤) in China last month. Beijing allegedly gave the KMT three conditions it had to
STAYING ALERT: China this week deployed its largest maritime show of force to date in the region, prompting concern in Taipei and Tokyo, which Beijing has brushed off Deterring conflict over Taiwan is a priority, the White House said in its National Security Strategy published yesterday, which also called on Japan and South Korea to increase their defense spending to help protect the first island chain. Taiwan is strategically positioned between Northeast and Southeast Asia, and provides direct access to the second island chain, with one-third of global shipping passing through the South China Sea, the report said. Given the implications for the US economy, along with Taiwan’s dominance in semiconductors, “deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority,” it said. However, the strategy also reiterated
‘BALANCE OF POWER’: Hegseth said that the US did not want to ‘strangle’ China, but to ensure that none of Washington’s allies would be vulnerable to military aggression Washington has no intention of changing the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Saturday, adding that one of the US military’s main priorities is to deter China “through strength, not through confrontation.” Speaking at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, Hegseth outlined the US Department of Defense’s priorities under US President Donald Trump. “First, defending the US homeland and our hemisphere. Second, deterring China through strength, not confrontation. Third, increased burden sharing for us, allies and partners. And fourth, supercharging the US defense industrial base,” he said. US-China relations under
FRAUD ISSUES: The app meets none of Taiwan’s 15 cybersecurity standards, and in the past year, about 1,706 fraud cases have been identified on it The Ministry of the Interior yesterday ordered Taiwanese Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu (小紅書, also known as RedNote in English) for a year, after detecting hundreds of instances of fraud on the platform. The ISPs have been instructed to block access to the app to its more than 3 million users in Taiwan, effective immediately, Deputy Minister of the Interior Ma Shih-yuan (馬士元) told a news conference at the National Police Agency’s Fraud Prevention Center. The order is being implemented via protocols governing domain name system (DNS) response policy zones, he said. Xiaohongshu meets none
RSS