KMT slides further into the maw of the Lin scandal

Temple Lanterns in Taitung City.

Heh. The Lin Yi-shih scandal took a dramatic turn last week and again this week, moving closer to Vice President Wu Dun-yi. A friend passed around this China Times piece from today in which a local political associate of Wu's admitted he got NT$10 million from Chen Chi-hsiang, the same businessman who allegedly bribed Lin Yi-shih, the now-disgraced former Sec-Gen of the Cabinet who resigned after revelations of the scandal. The Taipei Times recapped:

Speculations about the vice president’s involvement in the case first surfaced last week when political commentator Hu Chung-hsin (胡忠信) said a high-ranking government official was also involved in the corruption scandal, claiming that “Mr X” introduced Chen to Lin and implying that Mr X was Wu Den-yih.

......

Following accusations that Wu introduced businessman Chen Chi-hsiang (陳啟祥) to Lin, who allegedly accepted NT$63 million (US$2.15 million) from Chen to help secure contracts with China Steel Corp (中鋼) and its subsidiaries, the Chinese-language Next Magazine yesterday claimed Wu’s wife, Tsai Ling-yi (蔡令怡), had made a phone call to a family friend, Wu Men-chung (吳門忠), to complain about their relationship being exposed by the magazine.

Wu Men-chung, a major votes broker for the vice president in his Nantou County hometown, is the father of Chen’s girlfriend’s daughter-in-law.

The magazine claimed that when Wu Den-yih denied having a relationship with Chen last week, Tsai made a call to Wu Men-chung on the same day and said he should have told Wu Den-yih about his family’s relationship with Chen’s girlfriend, Cheng Tsai-mei (程彩梅), before the magazine picked up the story, prompting Wu Men-chung to publicly clarify the issue.

The magazine also claimed that Wu Men-chung’s wife had accepted NT$10 million from Chen.

More revelations are due out on this one, I predict. Ma is taking a double whammy -- in addition to this mess, which will likely drag on for some time, the economy is tanking... The Academia Sinica slashed this year's growth forecast to just 1.94%. Foreign economic analysts have been taking pessimistic views on Taiwan's growth possibilities this year as well, especially with China entering a slowdown, Europe still a mess, and American politicians apparently uninterested in the future economic health of the nation. Ma's claims that Taiwan had to have ECFA in order to get the FTAs that will prevent economic isolation have been undercut by events -- trade with ASEAN is growing, trade with China is shrinking, and Taiwan has experienced no broad benefits from ECFA. What will he turn to next?

It will also be interesting to see how the DPP handles this scandal. Too bad there are no major elections coming up soon....
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Daily Links:

• Diplomatic Space, NGOs and Taiwan from Brookings
• Tamsui's Shalun beach, where the French landed.
• Ma wants beef issued settled with US beef allowed in by the end of July. The decision by the Codex Commission of the UN to permit small amounts of ractopamine in beef really threw the locals a curve ball.
• Another Taiwan military officer selling secrets to Beijing? Officer goes missing after vacation in Thailand. Thailand traditionally is clandestine Taiwanese/Chinese meeting ground, much as Vienna was the cockpit of Cold War espionage.

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