The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an appeal from former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Tainan County council speaker Wu Chien-pao (吳健保), upholding his 10-year prison sentence for baseball match-fixing and other charges.
Wu had fled to the Philippines in 2014 after he was convicted for fixing CPBL games — as well as charges of corruption, fraud, intimidation and blackmail, and profiteering from illegal excavation — but was arrested in January last year and extradited to Taiwan with cooperation from the Philippine authorities.
The court’s ruling, which was final and cannot be appealed, upheld the High Court’s 2009 conviction.
Wu and his collaborator, Tsai Cheng-yi (蔡政宜), known as the “Windshield Wiper,” headed an underground gambling syndicate that many fans say “ruined Taiwanese baseball.”
The case, which came to light more than a decade ago, had implicated several leading CPBL figures, including players and coaches, in match-fixing and illegal betting dating back to the 1990s, and nearly caused the CPBL to fold.
New Taipei City prosecutors found that Wu and Tsai in 2006 started offering CPBL teams money, sexual services and expensive gifts to entice players to throw games. They then reaped huge profits through betting pools that Tsai ran, while Wu provided financial backing to operate the affair.
As investigation’s findings were revealed, CTBC Group terminated its ownership of the Chinatrust Whales in November 2008, and it nearly caused the La New Bears (now the Rakuten Monkeys) and Brother Elephants (now the CTBC Brothers) to disband.
Players indicted in the scandal included former Major League Baseball pitcher Tsao Chin-hui (曹錦輝), who had returned to join the Elephants, along with Elephants hitters Chen Chih-yuan (陳致遠) and Tsai Fong-an (蔡豐安), former Saitama Seibu Lions and Bears pitcher Chang Chih-chia (張誌家), and several top players of the Whales.
Wu was known as a powerful KMT politician in southern Taiwan, and as Tainan County council speaker and councilor he frequently clashed with then-Tainan mayor William Lai (賴清德) of the Democratic Progressive Party.
Left-Handed Girl (左撇子女孩), a film by Taiwanese director Tsou Shih-ching (鄒時擎) and cowritten by Oscar-winning director Sean Baker, won the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution at the Cannes Critics’ Week on Wednesday. The award, which includes a 20,000 euro (US$22,656) prize, is intended to support the French release of a first or second feature film by a new director. According to Critics’ Week, the prize would go to the film’s French distributor, Le Pacte. "A melodrama full of twists and turns, Left-Handed Girl retraces the daily life of a single mother and her two daughters in Taipei, combining the irresistible charm of
A Philippine official has denied allegations of mistreatment of crew members during Philippine authorities’ boarding of a Taiwanese fishing vessel on Monday. Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) spokesman Nazario Briguera on Friday said that BFAR law enforcement officers “observed the proper boarding protocols” when they boarded the Taiwanese vessel Sheng Yu Feng (昇漁豐號) and towed it to Basco Port in the Philippines. Briguera’s comments came a day after the Taiwanese captain of the Sheng Yu Feng, Chen Tsung-tun (陳宗頓), held a news conference in Pingtung County and accused the Philippine authorities of mistreatment during the boarding of
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is pushing for residents of Kinmen and Lienchiang counties to acquire Chinese ID cards in a bid to “blur national identities,” a source said. The efforts are part of China’s promotion of a “Kinmen-Xiamen twin-city living sphere, including a cross-strait integration pilot zone in China’s Fujian Province,” the source said. “The CCP is already treating residents of these outlying islands as Chinese citizens. It has also intensified its ‘united front’ efforts and infiltration of those islands,” the source said. “There is increasing evidence of espionage in Kinmen, particularly of Taiwanese military personnel being recruited by the
88.2 PERCENT INCREASE: The variants driving the current outbreak are not causing more severe symptoms, but are ‘more contagious’ than previous variants, an expert said Number of COVID-19 cases in the nation is surging, with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) describing the ongoing wave of infections as “rapid and intense,” and projecting that the outbreak would continue through the end of July. A total of 19,097 outpatient and emergency visits related to COVID-19 were reported from May 11 to Saturday last week, an 88.2 percent increase from the previous week’s 10,149 visits, CDC data showed. The nearly 90 percent surge in case numbers also marks the sixth consecutive weekly increase, although the total remains below the 23,778 recorded during the same period last year,
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