A marriage between a senior-high school student surnamed Lai (賴), who died just hours after getting married, and a man surnamed Hsia (夏) was a legally invalid, potentially affecting Hsia’s claim to NT$500 million (US$16.93 million) in real-estate assets owned by Lai, the Taichung District Court ruled on Wednesday.
The decision, which can be appealed, was made in response to a civil suit filed by Lai’s mother, the court said.
If the ruling is upheld, Hsia would lose the right to inherit the real-estate assets, it said.
Photo: Chang Jui-chen, Taipei Times
Lai and Hsia did not show “any mutual admiration for each other before the marriage” and “interactions between the two were distant and unfamiliar,” it said.
The court said it was unable to determine that Hsia and Lai had the “true intention of establishing a permanent union with intimacy and exclusivity,” and ruled that the union “lacked the essential requirements of marriage.”
The case follows Lai’s death on May 4, 2023, after he fell from Hsia’s 10th-floor apartment just two hours after the marriage was registered.
The Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office determined that there was insufficient evidence to charge Hsia with murder, given that there were no signs of trauma or traces of poison or alcohol in Lai’s body.
Hsia was indicted in June 2023 and in June last year was sentenced to 18 months in prison for forging documents that caused a civil servant to “make a false entry in public records” in connection with the marriage registration.
The court found that Hsia, who was 26 years old at the time, did not marry Lai, 18, for genuine reasons, but to obtain access to the real-estate assets Lai had received from his father earlier that year.
Lai’s mother later filed the civil suit seeking to formally annul the marriage.
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