The Tainan District Court on Thursday rejected a class-action lawsuit filed by former residents of a housing complex that in 2016 collapsed during an earthquake.
The court ruled that there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the Tainan Public Works Bureau, which had issued the construction licenses for the Weiguan Jinlong building in the city’s Yongkang District (永康).
The ruling can be appealed.
The 16-story complex collapsed during a magnitude 6.4 earthquake that struck southern Taiwan on Feb. 6, 2016, killing 117 people and injuring 504.
One-hundred-and-fifteen of those killed and 104 of those injured were in the building.
After the tragedy, 29 Weiguan Jinlong residents brought a lawsuit against the Tainan public works department, seeking damages of NT$278.9 million (US$9.98 million).
However, the court rejected the suit, saying that the department was not at fault, either in the area of issuing the building licenses or conducting inspections during the construction, as argued by the plaintiffs.
Six civil lawsuits have been filed in connection to the collapse, and a combined NT$1.22 billion has been awarded to the plaintiffs in three of the cases.
In a criminal case in November 2016, Lin Ming-hui (林明輝), the owner of the now-
defunct Weiguan Corp that built the housing complex in 1993, and four other defendants were found guilty of negligent homicide and were each sentenced to five years in prison.
The five convicts were deemed responsible for the poor design and construction of the building, as well as the use of inferior materials to cut costs.
As a result, the building could not withstand the earthquake and collapsed, the court said in its ruling.
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