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Annette Lu points
finger at Control Yuan over probes
By Chris Wang / Staff reporter
Former vice president Annette Lu (§f¨q½¬) yesterday appealed to the Control Yuan,
accusing prosecutors of engaging in a ¡§selective investigation¡¨ and malicious
prosecution in a corruption case in which Lu was found not guilty.
Lu said she would like to highlight two episodes of misconduct by the Supreme
Prosecutors Office¡¦s Special Investigation Division (SID), saying the division¡¦s
selective investigations only went after pan-green camp officials and violated
the principle of presumption of innocence, adding that its prosecution cases
were malicious.
The SID ignored hundreds of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) officials who were
also involved in controversial lawsuits and opted to go after Democratic
Progressive Party politicians, the former vice president said.
Lu and former Presidential Office secretary-general Yu Shyi-kun (´å¿ü堃) were found
not guilty on July 2 by the Taipei District Court of using fraudulent receipts
to claim state affairs funds during their stint in the Presidential Office,
almost five years after they were charged.
A separate case in which Lu, Yu and former foreign minister Mark Chen (³¯ð¤s) were
charged with using fraudulent receipts to claim special allowance funds were
also dropped on the same day, with the district court saying that an amendment
approved last year by the legislature stipulates that no officials would be
prosecuted for suspicious reimbursements from special allowance funds that took
place before Dec. 31, 2006.
Lu said the appeal was filed not only on her behalf, but for the 6,500
government officials involved in the cases, a by-product of the longstanding
political division between the pan-blue and pan-green camps.
Citing statistics compiled by the Ministry of Justice, Lu said the conviction
rate for corruption-related cases as of December last year was 60.8 percent,
which means that ¡§40 percent of those who were indicted were eventually proved
innocent, but not before lengthy, painful and expensive legal proceedings.¡¨
It is unprecedented in the history of the Constitution of the Republic of China
for a former vice president to submit such an appeal, Control Yuan member Huang
Huang-hsiung (¶À·×¶¯) said, adding that the Control Yuan would cautiously deal with
the appeal.
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