The High Court yesterday upheld a not-guilty ruling in an insider trading case involving OBI Pharma chairman Michael Chang (張念慈) and four of the company’s executives.
The high court upheld the Shilin District Court’s ruling in June 2019 that there was insufficient evidence showing that Chang, general manager Amy Huang (黃秀美), former vice chairman Hsu Yo-gung (許友恭), research and development director Yu Cheng-te (游丞德) and administration division manager Liao Tsung-chih (廖宗智) committed insider trading.
The ruling can be appealed.
Photo: CNA
Prosecutors first filed insider trading charges against the five in January 2017 based on provisions of the Securities and Exchange Act (證券交易法).
Shilin prosecutors alleged that the five learned at an internal meeting in August 2015 that the results of a double-blind clinical trial for OBI-822, a therapeutic breast cancer vaccine the company had developed, were unsatisfactory.
They then sold their shares in the company from September 2015 to January 2016 to avoid potential losses before the results were officially announced in February 2016, prosecutors said.
However, the Shilin District Court ruled that insufficient information was provided at the meeting to give participants the ability to determine whether the drug would meet the clinical trial’s expectations or be effective.
It therefore concluded that the five did not contravene Article 157-1 of the act, which forbids people holding senior posts in a company to sell their shares in the company “upon actually knowing of any information that will have a material impact on the price of the securities of the issuing company.”
Prosecutors later appealed the case at the High Court.
In response to yesterday’s ruling, OBI Pharma thanked the court for its decision.
It said in a statement that clinical trials for new drugs are a highly specialized field, so prosecutors were confused and made false accusations against the company’s executives.
The company called on prosecutors not to appeal the case again to avoid wasting time and money, while pledging that it would continue to develop drugs to prove its capability in the field.
OBI Pharma announced late last year that it would be proceeding with a phase 3 clinical trial of OBI-822.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater