A former navy captain was sentenced to 15 years behind bars on Wednesday for taking kickbacks in the navy’s purchase of six Lafayette-class frigates from France in 1991, but he will not have to go back to prison because he has already served 20 years of a separate sentence.
The Supreme Court upheld a 15-year sentence given to Kuo Li-heng (郭力恆) by the Taiwan High Court last year, fined him NT$200 million (US$6.63 million) and demanded the return of NT$10.4 billion in illicit gains linked to the deal frozen in foreign bank accounts.
However, thanks to a clause in the Criminal Code, the 60-year-old will be able to avoid the sentence because of the time he served after a military court convicted him of taking bribes and disclosing classified information during a minesweeper procurement deal.
Since 1994, Kuo had been serving a life sentence handed down by the military court, but benefited from an amendment to the Code of Court Martial Procedure (軍事審判法) last year that transferred all military criminal cases to civilian courts during peacetime.
Since the civilian Criminal Code limits prison terms to 20 years, Kuo was released from jail in December last year.
In addition to the bribery cases, Kuo is also suspected of having had a role in the 1993 murder of his former boss, Captain Yin Ching-feng (尹清楓), which remains unsolved.
At the time of the murder, Kuo was an officer in the navy’s Weapons Procurement Office and is alleged to be one of the few people privy to the circumstances surrounding Yin’s death.
Yin is widely believed to have been murdered because he was preparing to blow the whistle on the people who received kickbacks from the inflated prices Taiwan paid for the six frigates.
About a dozen Taiwanese and French linked to the frgiate deal have died under suspicious circumstances since Yin’s body was found by fishermen on Dec. 10, 1993, in waters off the coast of Suao (蘇澳) in Yilan County.
In addition to the possibility that he might know who murdered Yin, Kuo’s case has received major attention because of the huge amounts of money authorities say he stashed outside of Taiwan.
The Supreme Court’s ruling means that the government can finally ask Swiss authorities to retrieve the NT$10.4 billion frozen in the Swiss accounts of arms broker Andrew Wang (汪傳浦).
Wang brokered the deal between French contractor Thomson-CSF (later renamed Thales Group) and the navy, edging out an alternate offer for frigates from South Korea. He fled the country following Yin’s death and has been on the wanted list for murder since September 2000.
The government asked Swiss authorities to freeze Wang’s accounts, but they declined to return the funds pending a final ruling on the case, even after the High Court’s decision established Kuo’s relationship with Wang and their role as the principal offenders.
After Thomson-CSF won the bid, Kuo was instrumental in providing Wang with military information, the High Court found.
Thales paid Taiwan US$875 million for unauthorized commissions in 2011, in line with an international arbitration court’s ruling.
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