Former independent legislator Yang Tsung-jer (楊宗哲) was sentenced on Friday to 13 years in prison for corruption by the Taiwan High Court’s Taichung branch.
Yang was convicted for receiving NT$8.31 million (US$284,000) in bribes while serving as chief of Hsihu Township (溪湖) in Changhua County.
Yang’s wife, Yeh Mei-hui (葉美惠), was sentenced to nine-and-half years in prison for her role in the same case.
Photo: Liu Hsiao-hsin, Taipei Times
Yang, Yeh and other defendants can still appeal the ruling with the Supreme Court.
Yang was elected Hsihu Township chief in 1998. He and the township’s 12 representatives passed an order under which any firm that won a bid for township construction projects had to remit 25 percent of the construction fee as a commission. Under the plan, Yang took 5 percent of the commission while the 12 representatives shared 20 percent, the ruling said.
In the ruling, the court found that some of the money was used to fund the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential campaign ahead of the 2000 election.
The ruling added that Yeh had represented Yang in asking contractors for bribes.
The ruling said a contractor who won a NT$3 million road construction bid was asked to pay more than NT$600,000, but since it was known that he was in financial difficulty, they asked him to pay just NT$180,000.
The ruling said six of the 12 representatives, who confessed they took bribes during investigations and became witnesses for the prosecution, had already been found not guilty by a lower court.
Yang, Yeh and six representatives have denied taking bribes.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
The next minimum wage hike is expected to exceed NT$30,000, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday during an award ceremony honoring “model workers,” including migrant workers, at the Presidential Office ahead of Workers’ Day today. Lai said he wished to thank the awardees on behalf of the nation and extend his most sincere respect for their hard work, on which Taiwan’s prosperity has been built. Lai specifically thanked 10 migrant workers selected for the award, saying that although they left their home countries to further their own goals, their efforts have benefited Taiwan as well. The nation’s industrial sector and small businesses lay
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