New Taipei City prosecutors yesterday indicted nine entertainers over their alleged connection to a fraud ring that produces falsified documents to help people evade military service, including actor Darren Wang (王大陸) and show host William Liao (廖威廉).
Twenty-eight people were charged with contravening the Punishment for Violation of Military Service System Act (妨害兵役治罪條例) and Article 214 of the Criminal Code for “causing a public official to make a false entry in a public document.”
Prosecutors alleged the fraud ring was ran by a man, Chen Chih-ming (陳志明), and his three assistants, and that they were paid to help people dodge compulsory military service by taking advantage of loopholes in medical examinations, using substitutes and falsifying documents.
Photo: Lo Pei-de, Taipei Times
Evidence showed that Chen received a total of NT$7.63 million (US$258,469) from “draft dodgers” from 2016, when the operation began, until it was shut down in January, prosecutors said.
Wang, 34, allegedly paid the highest fee of NT$3.6 million and is the most prominent star embroiled in the case, the indictment read.
The rest paid between NT$50,000 and NT$500,000, it said.
Other famous figures indicted in the case included singer Nine Chen (陳零九), Daniel Chen (陳大天) and Jushe Lee (李銓).
Taiwan requires all able-bodied males aged 18 to 36 to serve mandatory military service.
Those with certain physical or medical conditions may be exempted, but they must be certified through medical examinations that are conducted under the supervision of military conscription officers.
Wang, who mainly worked in China, allegedly handed his National Health Insurance Card to Chen for processing and paid a fee to evade military service, prosecutors said.
The fraud operation was shut down in January when Chen was arrested. When Wang applied for a new health insurance card in February, he claimed he had lost it.
His attempt to dodge military service led prosecutors to charge him with offenses of “causing a public official to make a false entry in a public document.”
An investigation found that Chen and his assistants taught people ways to cheat the blood pressure test, including sending a substitute to take the test, and use other loopholes, such as altering test results to indicate physical abnormalities, the prosecutors said.
When the “dodgers” go for a second round of examinations, they would again use deception and falsified papers to get exempted from military service, they said.
BUILDUP: US General Dan Caine said Chinese military maneuvers are not routine exercises, but instead are ‘rehearsals for a forced unification’ with Taiwan China poses an increasingly aggressive threat to the US and deterring Beijing is the Pentagon’s top regional priority amid its rapid military buildup and invasion drills near Taiwan, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday. “Our pacing threat is communist China,” Hegseth told the US House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense during an oversight hearing with US General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Beijing is preparing for war in the Indo-Pacific as part of its broader strategy to dominate that region and then the world,” Hegseth said, adding that if it succeeds, it could derail
CHIP WAR: The new restrictions are expected to cut off China’s access to Taiwan’s technologies, materials and equipment essential to building AI semiconductors Taiwan has blacklisted Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯), dealing another major blow to the two companies spearheading China’s efforts to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chip technologies. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’ International Trade Administration has included Huawei, SMIC and several of their subsidiaries in an update of its so-called strategic high-tech commodities entity list, the latest version on its Web site showed on Saturday. It did not publicly announce the change. Other entities on the list include organizations such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as companies in China, Iran and elsewhere. Local companies need
CROSS-STRAIT: The MAC said it barred the Chinese officials from attending an event, because they failed to provide guarantees that Taiwan would be treated with respect The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) on Friday night defended its decision to bar Chinese officials and tourism representatives from attending a tourism event in Taipei next month, citing the unsafe conditions for Taiwanese in China. The Taipei International Summer Travel Expo, organized by the Taiwan Tourism Exchange Association, is to run from July 18 to 21. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokeswoman Zhu Fenglian (朱鳳蓮) on Friday said that representatives from China’s travel industry were excluded from the expo. The Democratic Progressive Party government is obstructing cross-strait tourism exchange in a vain attempt to ignore the mainstream support for peaceful development
ELITE UNIT: President William Lai yesterday praised the National Police Agency’s Special Operations Group after watching it go through assault training and hostage rescue drills The US Navy regularly conducts global war games to develop deterrence strategies against a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, aimed at making the nation “a very difficult target to take,” US Acting Chief of Naval Operations James Kilby said on Wednesday. Testifying before the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, Kilby said the navy has studied the issue extensively, including routine simulations at the Naval War College. The navy is focused on five key areas: long-range strike capabilities; countering China’s command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting; terminal ship defense; contested logistics; and nontraditional maritime denial tactics, Kilby
RSS