The Taiwan High Court on Wednesday upheld the convictions of a former Democratic Progressive Party lawmaker and a second key defendant in the 2003 Sunny Bank loan scandal, handing out prison terms and ordering the confiscation of money that it deemed illegal profits.
The scandal involved the former chairman of Sunny Bank, Chen Shen-hung (陳勝宏), a former lawmaker who is now a DPP Central Standing Committee member, and his brother-in-law Hsueh Tsung-hsien (薛宗賢).
Wednesday’s verdict sentenced Chen to 30 months in prison, fined him NT$2.2 million (US$75,549) and ordered the confiscation of NT$9.95 million.
Hsueh was sentenced to three years and six months in prison, fined NT$4 million and told to repay NT$32.65 million in illegal profits.
The verdict, which ended the second retrial of the case, can still be appealed.
The case against the two men has been winding through the court system for 12 years, with the Supreme Court twice ordering the Taiwan High Court to retry it.
Former DPP lawmaker Hsueh Ling (薛凌) was cleared in the first and second verdicts, and her not guilty verdict was finalized in 2012, with the defense saying she had not known the details of the questionable bank loans made to her younger brother.
Court documents indicate that Hsueh Tsung-hsien worked with two Sunny Bank executives to purchase the Taipei headquarters of the China Daily News, which was owned by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
The building had a price tag of more than NT$400 million, and the three men forged documents to purchase the property and to set up four dummy bank accounts, the court found, with prosecutors claiming that Hsueh Tsung-hsien had used the paperwork to conceal his relationship to his sister, who was on the bank’s board at the time.
Hsueh Tsung-hsien then applied to the bank for a NT$470 million loan.
The bank ended up giving him a total of NT$340 million through several loans.
The court found that Chen helped approve the loans during a board meeting that he presided over, despite knowing that the loans contravened Taiwan’s banking regulations, which prohibit loans to “interested parties” having close degree of family and kinship relationship.
Hsueh Tsung-hsien bought the building using the Sunny Bank loans and a NT$300 million personal loan from his sister.
Questions about the legality of the bank loans were raised by government financial regulators in 2006.
However, as Hsueh Tsung-hsien gradually repaid the bank’s loans, the initial court hearings determined that the bank had not suffered any losses from the improperly approved loans.
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