The Taipei District Court yesterday sentenced former Taoyuan county deputy commissioner Yeh Shih-wen (葉世文) to a jail term of 19 years and Farglory Land Development Co (遠雄建設) chairman Chao Teng-hsiung (趙藤雄) to four-and-a-half years on corruption charges involving two government-sponsored low-cost housing projects.
Yeh is also required to pay a fine of NT$33.17 million (US$1.06 million), while Chao must pay a NT$900,000 fine.
Former Farglory vice president Wei Chun-hsiung (魏春雄) was given a four-year term and a fine of NT$500,000 for his role in bribing government officials to secure contracts for real-estate development projects.
Photo: Lin Mei-fen, Taipei Times
Tsai Jen-hui (蔡仁惠), a former National Taipei University of Technology professor who acted as a “white glove” to transfer the money, was given a lighter sentence of six months and a fine of NT$200,000 because he had cooperated with the investigation and acted as a witness for the prosecution.
The guilty verdict is a fall from grace for Chao, one of the nation’s most high-profile and successful real-estate tycoons, and also for Yeh, who at the time of his arrest last year was the second-in-command to John Wu (吳志揚), then-Taoyuan county commissioner of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Previously, Yeh headed up the Construction and Planning Agency (CPA), where he allegedly earned a reputation for questionable ethics, before his appointment as Taoyuan County deputy commissioner in July last year.
According to the ruling, Yeh was found to have received a total of NT$20 million in bribes when he was in charge of Taoyuan’s projects to build low-cost housing in Linkou (林口) and Bade (八德) districts.
Yeh is also being investigated for bribery in two other real-estate development projects that came under his supervision as a government official.
Yesterday’s verdicts can be appealed.
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