The Taipei District Court today reasserted in a retrial its earlier ruling that former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) cannot be prosecuted for money laundering due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.
The money-laundering allegations stem from a separate case in which Chen and his wife, Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍), were accused of accepting NT$10 million (US$303,567) in bribes to appoint Diana Chen (陳敏薰) chairperson of Taipei 101.
Chen Shui-bian, a member of the Democratic Progressive Party, was president from 2000 to 2008, while Diana Chen served as Taipei 101's first head of operations from 2004 to 2008.
Photo: Taipei Times file photo
During the bribery case, in which the former president and his wife were both sentenced to eight years in prison, the Taiwan High Court said that Chen had also been an accomplice to money laundering, prompting Taipei prosecutors to open an investigation and ultimately file charges.
As Chen's money-laundering case got underway, he was found by doctors to be unfit to stand trial on medical grounds, as a result of which the trial was suspended on May 13, 2015.
In May last year, the Taipei District Court said Chen could no longer be prosecuted, as the statute of limitations for the crime — 10 years at the time — had expired.
Prosecutors appealed the decision to the Taiwan High Court, which ruled that both sides had a right to be heard before a final judgement.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
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