The Taipei District Court today sentenced four former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) members for espionage and leaking sensitive information — itineraries of the vice president’s visits to diplomatic nations — to intelligence officials from the Chinese Central Military Commission.
Former councilor assistant Huang Chu-jing (黃取榮) was sentenced to 10 years in prison, while Ho Jen-chieh (何仁傑), a former assistant to then-minister of foreign affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮), received eight years and two months.
Chiu Shih-yuan (邱世元), the former deputy director of the DPP’s Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, received six years and two months, and former Presidential Office consultant Wu Shang-yu (吳尚雨) was handed a four-year sentence.
Photo: Taipei Times file
All four rulings can be appealed.
The court also fined Huang NT$1 million (US$32,872) and confiscated or ordered the recovery of NT$4.97 million in criminal proceeds. Chiu was fined NT$50,000, with NT$2.21 million in proceeds confiscated.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office on June 10 indicted the four for leaking and relaying sensitive information under the Classified National Security Information Protection Act (國家機密保護法).
They were also charged earlier this year with contravening the National Security Act (國家安全法) by providing government secrets to China, and money laundering under the Money Laundering Control Act (洗錢防制法).
Meanwhile, the Taiwan High Prosecutors’ Office indicted Huang under the National Security Act for his alleged role in establishing extensive espionage networks, though the trial is ongoing.
Huang, a former assistant to New Taipei City Councilor Lee Yu-tien (李余典) from 2003 regularly traveled to China to sell tea and study at Jinan University, where he met two intelligence officers from the Central Military Commission, prosecution documents showed.
He was later recruited as a spy and provided with a work phone with a one-way data transmission app disguised as a gaming app, prosecutors said.
In 2017, he recruited Chiu, taking him on trips to Bangkok and Macau in 2023 and last year to meet Chinese intelligence officers, they said.
Chiu then asked Wu Shang-yu for sensitive information related to then-vice president William Lai’s (賴清德) official visits to Paraguay and his campaign travel schedule, prosecutors said.
In 2022, Huang recruited Ho to provide records of conversations between Joseph Wu and foreign envoys or dignitaries, details of the US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st Century Trade pact and Taiwan’s emergency measures after the severing of diplomatic ties, they said.
Huang then compiled the classified information provided by Chiu and Ho and transmitted it via the encoded gaming app, they said.
Huang received more than NT$6.07 million in payments from the Chinese Communist Party, including NT$900,000 in cash seized in a search of his residence, while Chiu was paid more than NT$2.21 million, prosecutors found.
The two were paid tens of thousands of New Taiwan dollars quarterly, and received holiday bonuses worth tens of thousands of NT dollars, they found.
The payments were funneled through accounts of relatives and friends in China, then laundered back to Taiwan via underground remittances, prosecutors said.
Wu Shang-yu and Ho were found not to have obtained any illicit proceeds.
All four were expelled from the DPP in May.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS