The High Court’s Taichung Branch yesterday rejected an appeal by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Yen Kuan-heng (顏寬恒), upholding his prison sentence of eight years and four months for corruption and related crimes.
The court said the corruption conviction could still be appealed to the Supreme Court, so the opposition lawmaker’s seat in the Legislative Yuan is not immediately affected.
Yen used a sham house transaction with a design company to hide the illegal occupation of state-owned land in Taichung’s Shalu District (沙鹿), prosecutors said.
Photo: Liao Yao-tung, Taipei Times
Yen and construction company head Lin Chin-fu (林進福) arranged a NT$45.41 million (US$1.5 million) “loan” to design company head Chang Yu-ting (張于廷), who then used the money to purchase the property, they said.
Yen used Lin as a proxy to illegally collect NT$1.08 million in Legislative Yuan staff salaries, prosecutors said, citing account records such as a “Yen collection and payment summary” as key evidence of a contravention of the Anti-Corruption Act (貪污治罪條例).
In July last year, the Taichung District Court convicted Yen of corruption, sentencing him to seven years and 10 months in prison, and stripping him of his civil rights for three years.
It added a six-month term for document forgery, convertible to a fine.
However, the district court found Yen not guilty of unauthorized occupation of publicly owned land.
The High Court’s Taichung Branch upheld those findings yesterday, saying the forgery and land encroachment rulings are final, and ordering Yen and Lin to be restricted from leaving Taiwan for eight months.
Outside the courthouse, Yen said he “cannot accept the verdict,” which he described as “judicial persecution.”
He also argued that assistant duties and salary disbursements were “entirely under Lin Chin-fu’s control.”
Regarding the house sale, Yen said it was “a real transaction without any falsehood, and all money flows were presented.”
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