Former Yuanta Financial Holding president Victor Ma (馬維建) said at a court hearing yesterday that he kept NT$740 million (US$23 million) for former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) “out of sympathy” for Chen.
Ma was indicted on Dec. 24 last year, along with 22 others, for helping Chen conceal funds accumulated through corruption.
Ma told the Taipei District Court that Chen’s wife, Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍), asked her brother Wu Ching-mao (吳景茂) and Tu Li-ping (杜麗萍), a former director of the board of Yuanta, to carry seven or eight trunks to his Taipei home one day in 2006 and asked him to keep the trunks in his basement vault.
PHOTO: CHANG CHIA-MING, TAIPEI TIMES
Ma said he asked Wu Ching-mao, whom he did not know, what was in the trunks, to which the latter responded “cash.”
Ma said that when he hesitated, Wu Ching-mao pleaded with him, saying that the money was to provide for Chen’s living expenses after retirement.
Ma said he agreed to keep the trunks and confirmed with Wu Ching-mao that they contained NT$740 million.
Ma told the court that he asked Tu the next day “why she had put me to such trouble,” Tu told him that she thought the trunks contained documents about Taiwanese independence because Wu Shu-jen told her there were secret documents in them.
“Tu was glad she thought she was doing something to help the cause of Taiwan independence,” Ma told the court.
Also yesterday, the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office’s Special Investigation Panel (SIP) announced that another US$1 million in funds stashed by Chen’s family in banks in Switzerland had been wired back to Taiwan.
The latest remittance brought to US$13.51 million the Chen’s family has wired from Switzerland to Taiwan, with a further US$7 million left in two Swiss bank accounts.
The SIP, which is leading the probe into the alleged corruption, believes the money was illegally obtained by Chen and is seeking to confiscate it.
The former president and his wife were sentenced to 20 years in jail for corruption by the Taiwan High Court in another case.
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