The Taichung branch of the High Court on Thursday upheld earlier corruption convictions against former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Nantou County commissioner Lee Chao-ching (李朝卿), handing him cumulative sentences totaling nearly 450 years.
The retrial concerned 94 of 111 counts in which Lee is was found guilty of receiving kickbacks and embezzling funds from public projects.
The High Court cleared Lee on four counts, but upheld verdicts on the other 90, the court ruling showed.
Photo: Hsieh Chieh-yu, Taipei Times
Eighty-one of the sentences carry an average of five to six years in prison.
Lee served two terms as Nantou County commissioner from 2005 to 2012.
He abused his role as a public servant and did not conduct his work in good faith, the ruling said.
“Lee took advantage of many public tenders, procurements and construction projects” by “demanding kickbacks from contractors,” it said.
The kickbacks and embezzlement began in 2008 and involved Lee’s brother-in-law, Chien Jui-chi (簡瑞祺), who acted as an intermediary, with some construction bids being rigged to divert an extra 10 percent of the cost to Lee, the ruling said.
The majority of the cases were related to the reconstruction of bridges, roads, facilities and other public infrastructure in the aftermath of Typhoon Morakot in 2009, which caused extensive damage in mountainous areas of central and southern Taiwan.
Lee and Chien have been in prison since August last year, following a High Court verdict on 17 of the cases.
An investigation alleged that Lee abused his authority by demanding 10 percent kickbacks or more from contractors involved in 111 public infrastructure projects, netting a personal benefit of NT$31.71 million (US$998,960 at the current exchange rate).
One such project, involving road and bridge reconstruction after the typhoon, had a budget of NT$94.6 million, from which Lee allegedly received NT$9.49 million from the construction company that secured the public tender, an investigation by public prosecutors showed.
The smallest alleged kickback was for a street sewer repair project in Puli Township (埔里), with a budget of NT$160,000, for which Lee received NT$16,000, prosecutors said.
The corruption investigation was one of the largest involving a local government head in the past decade, with contractors allegedly putting bundles of cash inside gift packs of tea and fruit.
Authorities reported finding several metal tea containers containing NT$30,000 each during a 2012 investigation.
Witnesses and evidence suggested that Chien would visit contractors to collect the kickbacks, which were packaged as gifts.
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
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
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