Media personality Clara Chou (周玉蔻) faces two battlefronts in the lawsuit involving former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), as the presiding judge yesterday ruled to combine Ma’s defamation case with one filed by Senhwa Biosciences chairman Benny Hu (胡定吾), a friend of Ma, who Chou accused of being the middleman in an illicit political donation.
Appearing at the Taiwan High Court in Taipei yesterday, Chou said she was surprised by the development and requested that the judges summon Hu so that Chou’s lawyers could cross-examine him about his testimony at the next hearing.
The case originated in 2014, when Chou claimed that Ting Hsin International Group (頂新集團) had donated NT$200 million (US$6.37 million at the current exchange rate) to Ma, who was in his second term as president.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
Chou alleged that the intermediary who passed the off-the-books donation from Ting Hsin to Ma was Hu, a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) financier who had previously been chairman of 101 Taipei Financial Center Corp and state-owned China Development Industrial Bank.
After a lower court in December 2015 found Chou not guilty of defamation, Ma filed a private case, saying the allegations were unsubstantiated.
Hu also filed a defamation lawsuit against Chou over the allegation.
“I hope the judges in this case will follow due process of the law ... There is a valid basis for what I have said about this matter,” Chou told reporters after her court appearance.
She said the court’s move to combine the two cases had surprised her, “but I am not a legal expert and I am not sure how it will affect the case. So I will have to discuss this with my lawyer.”
Legal analysts said that combining the two cases would be unfavorable to Chou, as she and her lawyers would need to undertake more work, preparing arguments and defending against witness testimonies and evidence presented by the legal teams of Ma and Hu.
Chou alleged that the NT$200 million donation violated the Political Donations Act (政治獻金法), as it was made to protect the business interests of Ting Hsin, which had suffered heavy blows from a series of adulterated food scandals.
The next hearing is scheduled for April 22.
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