President Chen's wife has been clearedin the Sogo vouchers case. Investigators found that she did accept NT$5 million in gift vouchers from a third party but that there was no evidence showing that she did so in return for help in a management struggle at Taiwan's most famed department store. As a result, prosecutors have not indicted her. One of the biggest wheels on the corruption allegations against Chen has just come off. Still the appearance of impropriety remains strong.
Who was the third party? What was the intention in giving all those vouchers?
What will the Blues do now? Their leaders have either admitted improprieties (Ma) or been convicted (Soong) or have associations with a notorious embezzler (Shih). It's a good thing they are against corruption; I'd hate to think what they'd be like if they supported it. The Bloomberg report linked by Feiren above, which is quite slanted, has the call:
"Our movement will likely gather momentum," said Jerry Fan, a spokesman for a campaign to oust Chen, after the prosecutors' decision was announced. "The judicial system can't live up to people's expectations."
They are never going to give up. If they are still demonstrating come the 2007 elections, this could seriously backfire on the Blues.
[Taiwan]
9 comments:
BBC has a report on it too:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/5399414.stm
The first lady had another party sell all those vouchers on Ebay or Yahoo. Nice way to get untraceable cash.
The investigator found that the Chen family used about NT$277,000 in gift vouchers, not NT$ 5 million mentioned at the top of the article.
Were the gifts declared? Does Taiwan have a tax evasion law, especially for bigwig politicians?
ha..rest assured, the blue camp won't never give up. they won't trust anything/anyone unless Chen and his family are behind bars. They don't even belive the findings conducted by Dr. Henry Lee about the 2004 two-bullet incident. Very pathetic la.
If Ckai Doong has the evidence to back up such an unambiguous claim, we'd love to see it. ;-)
LA will most likely ignore all the parts about there being no evidence of anything illegal on Wu's part. Feel free to prove me wrong-la.
Tim Maddog
One more thing: It looks like the anonymous commenter is correct to say that the NT$5 million figure is in error. I can't find it in any of the news stories, and it's about an 18x exaggeration of the NT$277,000 total supposedly involving Wu.
Tim Maddog
Just like the rich in the U.S., only a retarded fool will report 100% of their gifts/income. Of course the "reported" amount will be much less. Think about it Tim Maddog.....Mr. Chen is already a fool, but he's not retarded...yet
As I understand it, there was no evidence of influence peddling for free expensive coupons. But, why receive free coupons in the first place?
Politicans being careless with tax, that could be big trouble. Even got Al Capone in trouble.
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