Kaohsiung City Councilor Huang Shao-ting (黃紹庭) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), who boarded a flight for Xiamen, China, last week while under investigation for corruption was arrested after returning to Taiwan yesterday, according to prosecutors.
The Kaohsiung District Prosecutors Office said it had arrested Huang after he arrived on a flight into Kaohsiung International Airport at around 2pm.
Huang, 54, was nowhere to be found when investigators searched his residence and office in Kaohsiung on Thursday morning as part of a probe into allegations that he inflated the fees of publicly funded assistants working in his constituency office.
Photo copied by Huang Chia-lin, Taipei Times
It was later discovered that he had boarded a flight to Xiamen at 7am that day.
At the time, prosecutors said they had been informed by a source that Huang would return to Taiwan and submit to questioning as soon as a flight was available, without elaborating.
In a statement issued Friday, Huang said the China trip had already been on his personal agenda.
He denied knowing about the search beforehand and said he had not tried to avoid the investigation.
He said he told investigators of his planned trip after learning about the search on Thursday and said he would report back when he had finished managing his affairs in China.
Regarding the publicly funded assistant fees, Huang asserted that he did everything by the book and never made any false declarations.
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