The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday said it would ask the Singapore Supreme Court to carry out a compulsory acquisition of diplomatic broker Ching Chi-ju’s (金紀玖) assets after the court yesterday ruled that Taiwan can claim US$29.8 million from him in the high-profile Papua New Guinea diplomatic fraud case.
In 2006, Ching, a Republic of China national who holds a US passport, and Wu Shih-tsai (吳思材), a Singaporean national, acted as middlemen in a failed attempt to seek diplomatic ties with Papua New Guinea initiated by the then-Democratic Progressive Party government.
Under the deal, the ministry remitted US$30 million into a Singapore bank account opened by Ching and Wu in September 2006, with US$200,000 to be used as spending money by the duo.
The DPP government decided to abandon the talks after they fell through in October 2006 and Ching was to return the money in December 2006, but Ching went missing and so did the money.
In 2008, the ministry filed a complaint against Ching and Wu with Singapore’s Supreme Court, claiming the two had used the money for their own purposes rather than on the establishment of diplomatic relations with Papua New Guinea.
In December last year, the Singapore High Court ruled in favor of Taiwan and demanded that Ching return US$29.8 million.
Although Ching could file an appeal against the latest ruling, the court gave Taiwan the right to impound his assets.
“Despite the appeal clause, the foreign ministry will demand that the court seize [Ching’s] assets in accordance with Singaporean law as soon as possible,” said Chen Shou-han (陳首瀚), section chief of the ministry’s Department of Treaty and Legal Affairs, who attended the lawsuit on behalf of the ministry.
“The foreign ministy’s position on the matter is clear. We will make every effort to retrieve the money, not only from Singapore, but from any other countries where the money was placed,” ministry spokesman Henry Chen (陳銘政) told a press conference yesterday.
An official, who wished not to be named, said the ministry was confident that it could retrieve a third of the money, about US$10.5 million, from Singapore, including US$6 million from Ching’s bank account, which has been frozen by the court and US$3 million from Wu’s bank account, on top of the NT$50 million (US$1.5 million) Wu returned to the ministry at the end of last year.
In related news, both the ministry and the American Institute in Taiwan yesterday refused to comment on a report in the United Daily News claiming that US officials from the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency recently visited to assist the government in recovering money held overseas.
Right-wing political scientist Laura Fernandez on Sunday won Costa Rica’s presidential election by a landslide, after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade. Fernandez’s nearest rival, economist Alvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff. With 94 percent of polling stations counted, the political heir of outgoing Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves had captured 48.3 percent of the vote compared with Ramos’ 33.4 percent, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said. As soon as the first results were announced, members of Fernandez’s Sovereign People’s Party
EMERGING FIELDS: The Chinese president said that the two countries would explore cooperation in green technology, the digital economy and artificial intelligence Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday called for an “equal and orderly multipolar world” in the face of “unilateral bullying,” in an apparent jab at the US. Xi was speaking during talks in Beijing with Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi, the first South American leader to visit China since US special forces captured then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro last month — an operation that Beijing condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Orsi follows a slew of leaders to have visited China seeking to boost ties with the world’s second-largest economy to hedge against US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable administration. “The international situation is fraught
MORE RESPONSIBILITY: Draftees would be expected to fight alongside professional soldiers, likely requiring the transformation of some training brigades into combat units The armed forces are to start incorporating new conscripts into combined arms brigades this year to enhance combat readiness, the Executive Yuan’s latest policy report said. The new policy would affect Taiwanese men entering the military for their compulsory service, which was extended to one year under reforms by then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2022. The conscripts would be trained to operate machine guns, uncrewed aerial vehicles, anti-tank guided missile launchers and Stinger air defense systems, the report said, adding that the basic training would be lengthened to eight weeks. After basic training, conscripts would be sorted into infantry battalions that would take
GROWING AMBITIONS: The scale and tempo of the operations show that the Strait has become the core theater for China to expand its security interests, the report said Chinese military aircraft incursions around Taiwan have surged nearly 15-fold over the past five years, according to a report released yesterday by the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Department of China Affairs. Sorties in the Taiwan Strait were previously irregular, totaling 380 in 2020, but have since evolved into routine operations, the report showed. “This demonstrates that the Taiwan Strait has become both the starting point and testing ground for Beijing’s expansionist ambitions,” it said. Driven by military expansionism, China is systematically pursuing actions aimed at altering the regional “status quo,” the department said, adding that Taiwan represents the most critical link in China’s
RSS