The Ciaotou District Prosecutors’ Office in Kaohsiung has indicted a man on suspicion of recruiting people for sponsored tours to China, during which they were urged to vote for specific presidential candidates next month.
China Pan-Blue Association member Chen Chih-cheng (鄭志成) is the first person to be charged in one of many Chinese election interference cases prosecutors are investigating in the lead-up to the Jan. 13 presidential and legislative elections.
Cheng was charged with contravening the Anti-Infiltration Act (反滲透法), the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Act (總統副總統選舉罷免法) and the Public Officials Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法).
Photo: Wu Cheng-feng, Taipei Times
From May, Cheng recruited about 140 Taiwanese to visit China on tours mostly paid for by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO), prosecutors said.
Each person only needed to pay between NT$10,000 and NT$20,000, and Cheng received NT$2,000 for each person he recruited, they said.
The tour groups met with representatives from the TAO and the Chinese United Front Work Department, who urged them to vote for the “pan-blue camp” and “to remove the Democratic Progressive Party government from office,” prosecutors said.
Photo: CNA
In other election news, Pingtung County Council Speaker Chou Tien-lun (周典論) was yesterday detained on suspicion of buying signatures for Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) founder Terry Gou (郭台銘) to help him get the endorsements needed for to run in the presidential election.
Pingtung County prosecutors said that after receiving a tip-off that Chou had bought signatures for Gou for NT$200 each, they raided Chou’s residence at about 6am on Monday and took him in for questioning.
Suspecting Chou had breached the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Act, prosecutors filed a motion to detain him, which the Pingtung District Court approved early yesterday, the Pingtung District Prosecutors’ Office said.
Chou denied buying signatures and said that the funds involved were wages given to staffers to collect signatures, district court judge Wang Yi-chi (王以齊) said.
The judge did not accept Chou’s version of events as many witnesses testified that the fee was used to buy signatures, testimony that was corroborated by evidence, Wang said.
Gou announced his bid to run for president as an independent in late August.
Despite collecting enough signatures, he dropped out of the race and did not register his candidacy by the Nov. 24 deadline.
A Ministry of Foreign Affairs official yesterday said that a delegation that visited China for an APEC meeting did not receive any kind of treatment that downgraded Taiwan’s sovereignty. Department of International Organizations Director-General Jonathan Sun (孫儉元) said that he and a group of ministry officials visited Shenzhen, China, to attend the APEC Informal Senior Officials’ Meeting last month. The trip went “smoothly and safely” for all Taiwanese delegates, as the Chinese side arranged the trip in accordance with long-standing practices, Sun said at the ministry’s weekly briefing. The Taiwanese group did not encounter any political suppression, he said. Sun made the remarks when
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
The Taiwanese passport ranked 33rd in a global listing of passports by convenience this month, rising three places from last month’s ranking, but matching its position in January last year. The Henley Passport Index, an international ranking of passports by the number of designations its holder can travel to without a visa, showed that the Taiwan passport enables holders to travel to 139 countries and territories without a visa. Singapore’s passport was ranked the most powerful with visa-free access to 192 destinations out of 227, according to the index published on Tuesday by UK-based migration investment consultancy firm Henley and Partners. Japan’s and
BROAD AGREEMENT: The two are nearing a trade deal to reduce Taiwan’s tariff to 15% and a commitment for TSMC to build five more fabs, a ‘New York Times’ report said Taiwan and the US have reached a broad consensus on a trade deal, the Executive Yuan’s Office of Trade Negotiations said yesterday, after a report said that Washington is set to reduce Taiwan’s tariff rate to 15 percent. The New York Times on Monday reported that the two nations are nearing a trade deal to reduce Taiwan’s tariff rate to 15 percent and commit Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to building at least five more facilities in the US. “The agreement, which has been under negotiation for months, is being legally scrubbed and could be announced this month,” the paper said,
RSS