New Taipei City Councilor Lin Ming-jen (林銘仁) of the Democratic Progressive Party was detained and held incommunicado by the New Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office on Friday for allegedly misusing NT$5 million (US$156,436) of public funds through fraudulent payroll deductions.
Lin and his assistant, surnamed Yang (楊), allegedly conducted the unlawful activity between 2009 and 2016, when Lin served as then-Taipei County councilor and later New Taipei City councilor, the court said.
Lin was detained, while Yang was released on NT$100,000 bail and forbidden from leaving Taiwan or changing her residence, the court said.
Photo: Wang Ting-chuan, Taipei Times
On Thursday, prosecutors launched searches of Lin’s residence and offices in New Taipei City’s Tucheng (土城) and Shulin (樹林) districts and Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華), taking away potential evidence including notebooks and account books, the court said.
Prosecutors later interviewed seven suspects including Lin, as well as three witnesses on the same day.
After overnight questioning, five of the suspects were released on NT$30,000 bail each while prosecutors requested the formal detention of Lin and Yang over allegedly contravening Article 5 of the Anti-Corruption Act (貪污治罪條例) and Article 214 of the Criminal Code.
The New Taipei District Court approved the request to detain Lin, but released Yang on bail on Friday afternoon.
The 64-year-old Lin is serving his fifth term as councilor, having been re-elected for four consecutive terms.
Meanwhile, another New Taipei City councilor, Pai Pei-ju (白珮茹) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), was released on NT$600,000 bail and forbidden from leaving Taiwan over her alleged involvement in a similar case.
Pai allegedly contravened the Anti-Corruption Act by misusing more than NT$12 million of public funds through payroll fraud between 2009 and this year.
Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office and Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau personnel raided Pai’s offices and residence on Wednesday.
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office released Pai on bail on the same day.
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
US President Donald Trump said "it’s up to" Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be "very unhappy" with a change in the "status quo," the New York Times said in an interview published yesterday. Xi "considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing," Trump told the newspaper on Wednesday. "But I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that," he added. "I hope he doesn’t do that." Trump made the comments in
Tourism in Kenting fell to a historic low for the second consecutive year last year, impacting hotels and other local businesses that rely on a steady stream of domestic tourists, the latest data showed. A total of 2.139 million tourists visited Kenting last year, down slightly from 2.14 million in 2024, the data showed. The number of tourists who visited the national park on the Hengchun Peninsula peaked in 2015 at 8.37 million people. That number has been below 2.2 million for two years, although there was a spike in October last year due to multiple long weekends. The occupancy rate for hotels
RSS