Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) on Friday said that members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had ties to two men identified by New Taipei City prosecutors as central to money laundering and illegal betting operations.
Prosecutors earlier this week said that Lin Pin-wen (林秉文) and Kuo Che-min (郭哲敏) were part of an international money laundering scheme involving an estimated NT$2.7 billion (US$86.62 million).
Lin was arrested, questioned and released on NT$3 million bail, while Kuo had fled Taiwan after likely being tipped off about the investigation, prosecutors said.
Photo: Wang Ting-chuan, Taipei Times
Hsu said that Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦), Legislator and Taoyuan mayoral candidate Cheng Yun-peng (鄭運鵬) and Taipei City Councilor Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑), all of the DPP, had received financial benefits from Kuo and Lin in exchange for helping them receive approval to acquire land in Taoyuan and to push for commercial rezoning.
Hsu said that the officials had allegedly met with Kuo and Lin at Lin’s club, 88 Lounge, in Taipei.
Cheng Yun-peng’s campaign spokesman, Huang Wei-chun (黃韋鈞), said that “Hsu and her fellow KMT members made accusations which had no logic, no connection and no evidence.”
“It again showed that the KMT only specializes in smearing and rumormongering, as they are unable to present any concrete platform on new policies,” Huang said.
A Taoyuan government official quoted Cheng Wen-tsan as saying that Hsu had levied baseless accusations against him to tarnish his reputation.
He said he would file a defamation lawsuit against Hsu.
“Hsu put many unrelated things together to fabricate a story to mislead and deceive the public. She has acted with malicious intent to slander, and she is abusing freedom of speech to discredit political figures,” he said. “We will sue her for such an abhorrent attempt at character assassination.”
Prosecutors had said that Lin, 52, and Kuo, 38, began working together in 2019, registering several business entities to run online gaming sites and underground banking operations.
The pair mainly operated out of Taipei and New Taipei City, but their money laundering and other financial activities extended to China, the Philippines and Southeast Asia, they said.
Prosecutors said that Lin and Kuo had engaged in illegal transactions amounting to NT$2.7 billion since 2019, and are believed to have made about NT$100 million from the operation.
Lin and Kuo had created shell companies overseas and used dummy accounts to transfer payments and online gambling proceeds, and accumulated assets in various currencies, they said.
Lin operated online gambling, shopping and chat sites, some of which provided third-party payment processing, they said.
Kuo operated several commercial companies and was in a relationship to entertainer Claire Chien (錢帥君), prosecutors said.
The investigation found he had an office in Taoyuan tied to an online gambling company in Samoa, they said.
Prosecutors also said that they uncovered evidence linking Lin and Kuo to kidnapping and extortion rings, which allegedly offered loans and advertised jobs and would detain targets that could not pay in hotels.
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