After more than five years of litigation, a government foreign service official has been sentenced to more than eight years in jail for corruption in a student visa bribery scandal at Taiwan’s representative office in Vietnam, as the High Court rejected his final appeal on Tuesday.
The court upheld Hsiao Yu-wen’s (蕭裕文) convictions on multiple charges in a second retrial, handing him eight years and eight months in prison, confiscating all illegal profits pertaining to the case and rescinding his civil rights for four years. The sentence was reduced by two months from the verdict in the first retrial.
The latest verdict is final and cannot be appealed.
Photo: Chang Wen-chuan, Taipei Times
The Taipei District Court in 2016 had sentenced Hsiao to 12 years in prison on 27 counts of profiteering, and being in possession of assets and property he could not account for under the Anti-Corruption Act (貪污治罪條例), as well as related corruption charges. He continued to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, which ordered the case back to the High Court twice for retrials.
A member of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ diplomatic staff in Hanoi, Hsiao worked as chief secretary at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Vietnam, where approval of business and student visas was among his duties.
Investigators found that Hsiao had colluded with Taiwanese businessman Tsao Pao-lin (曹保麟) since 2010 to approve student visas for unqualified Vietnamese applicants seeking to study in Taiwan in exchange for cash. Tsao at the time served as secretary-general of the Council of Taiwanese Chambers of Commerce in Hanoi.
The High Court in 2017 sentenced Tsao to 18 months in jail for document forgery, commuted from the original penalty of two years handed down in the first trial by the Taipei District Court.
Investigations showed Tsao paid bribes to Hsiao to approve the visa applications of 27 Vietnamese students, despite knowing the applicants did not qualify.
Tsao was found to have counterfeited financial and Mandarin proficiency certificates for visa applicants.
He charged US$1,000 to US$4,500 for each Vietnamese applicant, and if they were successful, Tsao took a further 10 percent cut from tuition fees and other education payments, along with a “broker fee” of NT$2,000 to NT$3,000 (US$68 to US$101), investigators said.
Hsiao was found to have illegal assets including 83 Louis Vuitton luxury totebags and accessories estimated at NT$1.7 million, suspected illicit profits amounting to US$95,075 in bank accounts, along with Vietnamese currency worth about NT$2.85 million, most of which investigators said Hsiao could not account for.
When the judicial investigation began, Hsiao denied any wrongdoing and refused to cooperate, saying that issuing visas was his job, while the assets in question had come from earnings from various investments.
The courts rejected his claims, concurring with investigators that they were the proceeds of bribery.
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