The Tainan District Court yesterday rejected a request by prosecutors to hold five people in investigative detention, after six others were released on bail on Wednesday in connection with alleged fraud at state-linked green energy enterprises in the special municipality.
Authorities in Tainan on Tuesday raided 32 locations and questioned 34 people before submitting a court request that five suspects be detained and held incommunicado.
After convening a detention hearing on Wednesday at 6:30pm that lasted 10 hours, the court ruled at about 4:30am yesterday that there was insufficient evidence to place the five suspects in investigative detention, which would have allowed prosecutors to hold them incommunicado for two months.
Photo from the Taiyen Green Energy Co Web site
Prosecutors had asked the court for permission to detain former Taiyen Green Energy Co chairman Chen Chi-yu (陳啟昱), a former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker; former general manager Su Kun-huang (蘇坤煌); a former vice general manager surnamed Kuo (郭); and people with legal responsibility for Great Glow Technology Co, surnamed Su (蘇), and for Chao Yang Development Co, surnamed Tai (戴).
The Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office said the five might have contravened the Securities and Exchange Act (證券交易法) for breach of trust offenses and the Criminal Code for knowingly causing a public servant to publish an official document containing false information.
Six other suspects were released on bails ranging from NT$100,000 to NT$300,000 the previous day in connection to the case.
On Tuesday, the office had coordinated a team that included investigators from the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau to search 32 sites, including Taiyen Green Energy’s offices in the city’s Gueiren District (歸仁).
The company, a subsidiary of Taiyen Group, was established in 2017 “in response to the government’s promotion of energy transition,” information on the company’s Web site says.
Taiyen Group’s largest shareholder is the Ministry of Economic Affairs, which holds 38.88 percent of the company’s shares, it says.
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Legislator Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) wrote on Facebook that the investigators’ search on Tuesday “finally” happened more than a year after he had first “exposed the corruption case.”
A populist lawmaker who has repeatedly alleged that the ongoing corruption investigation of TPP Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) is politically motivated, Huang held a news conference in June in which he said Taiyen Green Energy was “a tool to reward the rich and powerful” in the DPP.
Prosecutors said they would appeal the court’s decision.
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