A former university professor has received a six-month prison sentence for falsifying documents relating to the safety inspection and assessment of three road bridges in Hsinchu County.
A Hsinchu District Court document showed that the verdict was handed down on Dec. 29 last year against Chen Ming-cheng (陳明正), who has an engineering consulting firm based in Taoyuan.
Chen’s office address had been registered at Chien Hsin University of Science and Technology, where he also previously taught. During this period, he hired a student at the university surnamed Huang (黃), the document said.
Photo: Liao Hsueh-ju, Taipei Times
In 2018, the company was awarded a bidding contract by the Hsinchu County Government to conduct routine on-site assessments of its bridges. Chen, who was responsible for the project, instructed Huang to file fake reports indicating that the Taihe, Houhu and Rueiguang bridges in Sinfeng Township (新豐) had been inspected.
The reports contained 56 images that were uploaded to the Taiwan Bridge Management System database in August that year for review by the county government.
However, the photographs were taken in 2016 by another company, the district court said.
Instead of inspecting the bridges, which is a public safety issue, Chen used unscrupulous methods to give the impression that work had been done, said the court, which sentenced him to six months in jail for document forgery.
Huang was sentenced to four months in prison, with the sentence suspended for two years.
Both the penalties Chen and Huang received can be commuted to a fine, the court said, adding that the defendants can file appeals.
Chen is embroiled in multiple legal cases and controversies, including the collapse of Yilan County’s Nanfangao Bridge, which killed six people and injured 12 in October 2019.
He has been accused of using unscrupulous methods to win bids to conduct inspections of the bridge in 2014, 2016 and 2017. He has denied the allegations.
However, Yilan prosecutors subsequently found other cases in which Chen’s firm filed fake reports involving the safety inspection of bridges in Yilan County. Prosecutors indicted him on charges of fraud and other offenses.
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