The Keelung District Prosecutors' Office today indicted seven people over the alleged forgery of recall petitions targeting city councilors from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Keelung branch chairman Wu Kuo-sheng (吳國勝) is accused of ordering local party officials to forge 1,063 petition signatures in the campaigns targeting DPP city councilors Cheng Wen-ting (鄭文婷) and Jiho Chang (張之豪), prosecutors said.
Wu allegedly also instructed Keelung Department of Civil Affairs Director Chang Yuan-hsiang (張淵翔) to use the Keelung City Government’s household registration system to help with the forgeries, contravening the Personal Data Protection Act (個人資料保護法), prosecutors said.
Photo: Lin Chia-tung, Taipei Times
The seven indicted are: Wu, Chang, Renai District (仁愛) KMT committee director Chang Chin-fa (張金發), recall campaign leaders Chi Wen-chuan (紀文荃) and Yu Cheng-yi (游正義), Jhongjheng District (中正) Household Registration Office Director Chiang Chien-yu (江鑒育) and Anle District (安樂) Household Registration Office Director Lin Fen-yun (林芬芸).
Eight other people confessed to their crimes and are facing suspended sentences and fines of NT$50,000 to NT$180,000, prosecutors said.
Due to a lack of evidence, Hsu Shao-yeh (許紹業), one of the recall campaign leaders, former KMT Keelung chapter deputy secretary Han Chi-yuan (韓元吉) and Keelung City Government advisor Hsieh Wei-jen (謝偉仁) were not charged, prosecutors said.
The scheme began when Wu realized that their recall campaigns might not have enough signatures and instructed Chang Chin-fa to find volunteers to forge the remaining ones, prosecutors said.
Wu had Chang Yuan-hsiang use the city’s household registration system to identify people who had changed households, prosecutors said, adding that they instructed Chiang and Lin Hsin-hong to assist in those efforts.
Prosecutors said they would be seeking heavier sentences for some people, including Chang Chin-fa and Chi, as they had given vague statements.
This afternoon, Wu, Yu, Chang Chin-fa and Chang Yuan-hsiang were transferred to the Keelung District Court where a hearing was to be held at 6pm to decide whether their detention would be extended.
The Keelung City Government today said it respects the results of the investigation.
The city government would act in accordance with the law and would not tolerate the abuse of personal information, it said, adding that reforms would be implemented and those involved in the case have left the government.
The city's Department of Civil Affairs and Civil Service Ethics Office have completed an inter-departmental review, the city government said.
The issue of whether to add a section for “reason of inquiry” in the household registration system would be discussed, it said.
The city government has implemented systematic internal adjustments and training, it said, adding that it would perform gatekeeping stringently to improve the protection of personal information and ensure administrative neutrality.
Additional reporting by CNA, Yu Chao-fu and Fion Khan
Fast food chain McDonald's is to raise prices by up to NT$5 on some products at its restaurants across Taiwan, starting on Wednesday next week, the company announced today. The prices of all extra value meals and sharing boxes are to increase by NT$5, while breakfast combos and creamy corn soup would go up by NT$3, the company said in a statement. The price of the main items of those meals, if ordered individually, would remain the same. Meanwhile, the price of a medium-sized lemon iced tea and hot cappuccino would rise by NT$3, extra dipping sauces for chicken nuggets would go up
Yangmingshan National Park’s Qingtiangang (擎天崗) nature area has gone viral after a park livestream camera observed a couple in the throes of intimate congress, which was broadcast live on YouTube, drawing large late-night crowds and sparking a backlash over noise, bright lights and disruption to wildlife habitat. The area’s livestream footage appeared to show a couple engaging in sexual activity on a picnic table in the park on Friday last week, with the uncensored footage streamed publicly online. The footage quickly spread across social media, prompting a tide of visitors to travel to the site to “check in” and recreate the
GROUNDED: A KMT lawmaker proposed eliminating drone development programs and freezing funding for counterdrone systems, despite China’s adoption of the technology China has deployed attack drones at air bases near the Taiwan Strait in a strategy aimed at overwhelming Taiwan’s air defense systems through saturation attacks, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said. The council’s latest quarterly report on China said that satellite imagery and open-source intelligence indicate that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had converted retired J-6 fighter jets into J-6W drones, which the PLA has stationed at six air bases near Taiwan, five in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province. The report cited J. Michael Dahm, a senior fellow at the US-based Mitchell Institute, as saying that China has
Carrefour Taiwan is to begin using a new name from the start of July, but it cannot divulge the name until then, the chairman of the supermarket chain's parent company said today. President Chain Store Co chairman Lo Chih-hsien (羅智先) was asked by reporters after a shareholders' meeting to confirm whether the company has settled on a new name for the supermarket brand. In March, the government-registered name of two Carrefour Taiwan branches was quietly changed to "Le Chia Kang" (樂家康) in Chinese, raising speculation that has been selected as the name. Lo said that because of local regulations and contractual obligations, the
RSS