The Taipei District Court’s ruling against Hsinchu Mayor Anne Kao (高虹安) was regrettable and highlighted the lack of proportionality in the justice system’s meting out of punishments for similar crimes, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) said yesterday.
Kao was found guilty of contravening the Anti-Corruption Act (貪污治罪條例) and sentenced to seven years and four months in prison for corruption that involved misuse of public funds.
She was also deprived of her civil rights for four years and suspended from her post as mayor. Article 78 of the Local Government Act (地方制度法) stipulates that a mayor of a special municipality found guilty of contravening the Anti-Corruption Act is to be suspended from office.
Photo courtesy of the Taiwan People’s Party
Formerly an aide to business tycoon Terry Gou (郭台銘), Kao joined the TPP and served as a legislator at-large from 2020 to 2022 before running for Hsinchu mayor. She withdrew her party membership after the ruling was announced.
The presiding judge had chosen to recognize the validity of claims that Kao’s legislative assistants had inflated their monthly overtime, but did not recognize the validity of Kao’s claims that she had paid out-of-pocket many official business expenses with the sum exceeding the NT$116,514 (US$3,549) the court said she had embezzled, the TPP said in a statement.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) New Taipei City Councilor Chou Ya-ling (周雅玲) and her sister Chou Wen-ying (周雯瑛), who were indicted on similar charges involving the payrolls of legislative assistants and accused of embezzling NT$13.88 million, were sentenced to eight months and six months in prison respectively, suspended for three years, the TPP said.
Citing another case, the TPP said that former DPP legislator Chen Lai Su-mei (陳賴素美) was accused of embezzling NT$7.85 million in assistants’ funds, and was sentenced to two years in prison, suspended for five years, on the grounds that “she had used most of the funds in service of the people and the disadvantaged, which is different from other cases wherein embezzlement served to benefit the self.”
Placed side by side, the ruling against Kao shows “the standards that the Taiwanese judiciary has on the principle of proportionality and the severity of sentences are highly disparate,” the TPP said.
The TPP added that Huang Hui-wen (黃惠玟), the former head of administrative affairs of Kao’s legislative office, had testified that she had only followed the same accounting methods that former DPP legislator Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) used, but the court had made no progress on a separate investigation into the case since August last year.
The judiciary should not have double standards and should investigate the other case to uphold the integrity of the law, the TPP said.
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