Chen's son summoned by prosecutors
　

GRANTING ACCESS: Prosecutors said that Chen Chih-chung offered to sign an agreement that allows prosecutors to access details of certain foreign bank accounts
　

By Jimmy Chuang
STAFF REPORTER
Saturday, Nov 15, 2008, Page 3
　

Former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) son Chen Chih-chung (陳致中) and daughter-in-law Huang Jui-ching (黃睿靚) signed an authorization agreement yesterday that allows the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office’s Special Investigation Panel (SIP) to investigate the foreign bank accounts that prosecutors allege were used by the former first family to launder money.

“They have signed the papers,” Lin Chih-hao (林志豪), Chen Chih-chung’s lawyer, said outside the prosecutors’ office.

SIP Spokesman Chen Yun-nan (陳雲南) later confirmed Lin’s comments.

“Chen [Chih-chung] said he would sign the agreement to help our investigations. We did not ask him to do so,” Chen Yun-nan said.

Chen Chih-chung and Huang arrived at the prosecutors’ office at around 9:25am and left at 1:15pm. Chen Yun-nan said that they had summoned Chen Chih-chung, his sister Chen Hsing-yu (陳幸妤) and Huang for questioning, but Chen Hsing-yu asked to be excused because of her busy work schedule.
　

“Chen Chih-chung and Huang will not be detained now they have signed the agreement allowing us access to the foreign bank accounts,” Chen Yun-nan said.

Chen Yun-nan confirmed that prosecutors had also summoned former first lady Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍), but he refused to confirm whether Wu had reported to prosecutors or where and when Wu’s questioning had taken place.

Meanwhile, prosecutors also questioned Taiwan Cement Corp (台泥) chairman Leslie Koo (辜成允) yesterday at 10:30am.

Koo left the office at around 2pm.

During their investigations, SIP prosecutors discovered that Koo had wired a total of NT$400 million (US$12.1 million) to an account belonging toWu.

Koo said he had told prosecutors that the NT$400 million had been paid as “commission” for help he received on a land deal and was not a political donation.

Koo was referring to a piece of land in Taoyuan that belonged to a company he inherited from his elder brother. In 2003, the company was in financial trouble and he wanted to sell the land, he said. Former Chinatrust Financial Holding Co (中信金控) vice chairman Jeffery Koo Jr (辜仲諒) introduced Tsai Ming-chieh (蔡銘杰) and Tsai Ming-che (蔡銘哲) to him, Koo said, adding that the Tsai brothers told him there would be a NT$400 million commission should a deal to sell the land be completed.

In February 2004, the National Science Council bought the land in order to build an industrial park. Koo said he then wired the NT$400 million to the account given to him by Tsai Ming-cher. Tsai Ming-cher is in detention in connection with the alleged money laundering case.

“I decided to tell prosecutors the truth,” Koo said. “I had to sell the land to solve my financial problems at the time. The money came out of my own pocket. It had nothing to do with the company or anybody else.”

Koo said that he understood what he had done was wrong and he would apologize to the public if what he had done had caused any trouble.

DPP supporters to rally in Taipei in support of Chen
　

By Mo Yan-chih
STAFF REPORTER
Saturday, Nov 15, 2008, Page 3

"The judiciary is unfair,” hundreds of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) supporters chanted yesterday as they held up placards in front of the Taipei Detention Center in Tucheng (土城), Taipei County, to protest against the arrest and detention of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).

The protesters, led by the director of the Taipei branch of the DPP, Huang Chin-lin (黃慶林), condemned President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration and prosecutors for detaining Chen without legitimate reason and urged prosecutors to release him.

“We need fair procedure and a just judiciary,” Huang and the other protesters shouted outside the center.

Several DPP Taipei County councilors also led supporters to show their support for Chen. More than 500 police were dispatched to the site to prevent violent clashes.

The court detained Chen on Tuesday after a six-month investigation into graft allegations against the former president. Chen has denied any wrongdoing.

Huang yesterday said the DPP would hold a large “evening party” at Taipei’s Yuanshan Park (圓山公園) next Saturday in support of Chen, adding that the demonstration would proceed even though the Taipei City Government had refused to grant the party a permit.

In response, Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) said yesterday that the city government would grant rally permits to any organization that applied using the proper procedures.

Taipei City’s Parks and Street Lights Office said it had granted the DPP a permit to use the park.

Hung Sheng-kun, commissioner of Taipei City’s Police Department, said the department would grant the DPP a rally permit as long as it followed the regulations.

China jails activist teacher

AFP, BEIJING
Saturday, Nov 15, 2008, Page 5

Chinese police have arrested an activist university professor on charges of inciting subversion after he set up an independent political party, his wife said yesterday.

Guo Quan (郭泉), a professor at Nanjing Normal University and frequent government critic, was taken into police custody on Thursday, his wife Li Jing (李晶) said by phone.

Guo formed the China People’s Livelihood Party in 2004 — renaming it the China New People’s Party late last year — to protect the rights of “workers, farmers, businessmen, students, and urban residents,” according to Guo’s blog, which is blocked in China.

“Police gave his mother an official notice saying Guo is suspected of subverting state power,” Li said.

“It is suspected that Guo might have been detained for organizing the China Xinmin Party [New People’s Party],” China Human Rights Defenders, a network of Chinese and overseas rights activists, said in an e-mailed statement.

In a recent blog entry, Guo called the eight other legal parties besides the Chinese Communist Party “flowers in a vase” meant to give the appearance of democracy in China.

The group also said the arrest could be linked to articles published online by Guo that criticized the Nanjing city government, particularly for its construction of a chemical plant.

Guo had previously been stripped of his teaching duties over his activism and his been held in detention before, according to his blog.

Guo’s blog claims the China New People’s Party has 10 million members and branches in all provinces of the country.

Meanwhile, two milk inspectors for a major dairy firm were severely beaten in an attack blamed on suppliers angry at tough new safety checks following a tainted milk scandal, the China Youth Daily reported yesterday.

The two men were working in the northern city of Tangshan as inspectors for Mengniu, one of China’s largest dairy companies, which has implemented strict new safety inspections, the paper said.

The attack occurred on Nov. 5 after inspector Li Zhongping had confronted an outside dairy supplier over a batch of milk he was selling that appeared not to confirm with new standards, it said.

“According to an initial analysis, this incident was triggered by [Li’s] decision that this truck’s milk was not in compliance,” it quoted an unnamed Mengniu official as saying.

Li and another inspector, Zhang Liwei, were set on by a group of about five club-wielding men as they left work later that day.

Li was badly beaten, suffering numerous injuries over his body, including fractured vertebra, and was in a coma for “a long time,” the paper said, without specifying Li’s current condition.

A judiciary on life support

Saturday, Nov 15, 2008, Page 8

Over the last weeks one half of this nation’s political divide has watched with increasing nervousness at the trend of detaining Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) identities without charge in unrelated cases.

On its own, this development might have spoken more of rottenness in the opposition party than a systemic problem with the judiciary, and there is no shortage of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators who argue exactly this. The fact that former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) has alienated long-time supporters has also allowed his arrest and detention to serve as fodder for his enemies and for anyone who acts as an apologist for judicial bias.

In the context of last week’s visit by Chinese envoys, however, and the mixture of incompetence and smugness with which the government has dealt with subsequent dissent, domestic and international attention on the judiciary’s ability to deliver justice impartially takes on more significance.

This attention can only become more marked if an inventory is drawn up showing the proportion of cases involving KMT figures that await action or that have been inexplicably abandoned.

The judiciary must retain or gain the confidence of a broad majority of Taiwanese — not just an electoral majority — for justice to be done and to be seen to be done. This will be difficult to achieve in the foreseeable future.

One of the legacies of autocratic rule is a lack of faith in juridical due process — and sometimes even a lack of awareness of its importance.

Democratization should have resulted in the rehabilitation of the judicial system’s credibility, but a lack of momentum for judicial reform and the gross politicization of key cases in recent years has hampered this work and made targets out of prosecutors and judges for both sides of the political spectrum.

The situation has not been helped by the ease with which influential people with current responsibility for judicial matters can produce comments of the utmost irresponsibility — and with impunity. These include the minister of justice and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) himself, who famously declared Chen to be corrupt during the “red shirt” protests — a defamatory act in the absence of evidence — and who subsequently declared his own corruption case to be politically inspired.

Chen’s claim this week that justice is “dead” and that his case amounts to political persecution might have been dismissed as self-interested nonsense were it not for the fact that senior KMT officials have been saying exactly the same thing for years.

The precedent had been set, and Chen has every reason to expect sympathy despite his stupidity — even moreso given that before his indictment prosecutors vowed to resign if they did not get their man, which was an intolerable attack on the presumption of innocence.

All of this reflects the corrosion that has afflicted the public sector under a KMT-dominated legislature and a yoked executive. The erosion of neutrality; a long legislative history of KMT encroachment on agencies that did not follow its party line; the formation of unconstitutional, Star Chamber-like legislative bodies that threatened to take Taiwan back 60 years — this is the mess that the KMT helped to create amid aborted attempts to build something better. And now, the man at the helm of the KMT while much of this took place is the nation’s president.