The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said on Friday night that it had recently received US$1 million from Singaporean authorities who wired it from the account of broker Ching Chi-ju (金紀玖), funds embezzled in the high-profile Papua New Guinea diplomatic fraud case.
The latest installment brought the amount of money the ministry has recovered so far to more than US$5.5 million.
The Singapore High Court ruled in May that Ching, a self-styled diplomatic broker, should return the US$29.8 million he and accomplice Wu Shih-tsai (吳思材) received from MOFA in September 2006 to pave the way to establish diplomatic ties with Papua New Guinea.
Not long after the money was wired to the middlemen, the ministry found out that Papua New Guinea would not cut diplomatic relations with Beijing, but by the time the ministry demanded that the money be returned, Ching had disappeared.
Wu was detained in Taiwan and later sentenced to a 26-month jail term on forgery and defamation charges.
In 2008, the ministry filed a complaint against Ching and Wu with Singapore’s Supreme Court, demanding the return of the money. In February, the Singapore High Court ruled Ching’s assets be frozen, before ordering the return of the funds in May.
The latest US$1 million remitted to the ministry’s account was retrieved from Ching’s personal assets, MOFA said.
MOFA said that although Ching decided to file an appeal with the Singapore Supreme Court earlier this month, the move would not hinder its efforts to trace the rest of the money.
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