Mon, May 07, 2007 page3

• Leak was a conspiracy: DPP's Wang

  POLITICAL PLOY The legislative whip said the leak of a prosecutorial document was a scheme cooked up by Kaohsiung Prosecutor Lo Chien-hsun and others

  • By Flora Wang / STAFF REPORTER
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  With the campaign camps of presidential hopefuls Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) and former premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) still exchanging fire over the leak to media of a prosecutorial document, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislative whip Wang Sing-nan (王幸男) yesterday sought to end the bickering by saying the leak was a conspiracy orchestrated by people within the prosecutorial system.

  Wang told reporters yesterday morning that the leak was a scheme cooked up by Kaohsiung Prosecutor Lo Chien-hsun (羅建勛) and several personnel at the Ministry of Justice's Investigation Bureau in a bid to sabotage Su and Hsieh, who are vying for the DPP's nomination for next year's presidential election.

  Wang said he intended to call Su and Hsieh on the eve of the party's primary in a bid to stop them from continuously wrangling over the leak, but "it was too late."

  The DPP party member vote took place yesterday.

  Wang was referring to heated exchanges between Su and Hsieh's camps over a story reported by the Chinese-language Next Magazine.

  On Wednesday, the magazine published a copy of what it said was an official document signed by Lo, which had been sent from the Kaohsiung bureau of the Taiwan High Court Prosecutors' Office to the Investigation Bureau on April 3.

  The magazine said that Lo believed Hsieh should be indicted on corruption charges on suspicion of accepting illegal donations from a Kaohsiung Rapid Transit Corp (KRTC) board member and others during his term as mayor of Kaohsiung.

  Hsieh's campaign initially criticized the Cabinet for the ministry's failure to discover the identity of the source of the leak before the primary.

  Su struck back at a separate event on Saturday by saying he had believed in Hsieh's innocence from the very beginning, but Hsieh's camp had still attacked and smeared him by sending text messages to the media accusing the Cabinet of being the mastermind behind the leak.

  The two camps took the infighting further by running advertisements on the front pages of major Chinese-language newspapers yesterday, with Su's camp accusing Hsieh of trying to shift the public's focus from the KRTC bidding scandal by linking Su to the leak.

  Wang said a source had told him that the source of the document leak was the same group of people who previously disclosed information to Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chiu Yi (邱毅), who is now serving jail time for leading a group of protesters in an attempt to break through the gates of the Kaohsiung District Court on March 21, 2004, after the 2004 presidential election.

  The caucus whip, however, did not present evidence to prove his allegation but said he would disclose details in a press conference today.

  In response, Lo issued a statement yesterday saying the prosecutorial document had been leaked by "Taipei's people on purpose," blasting them for the leak.

  "I am a person without any political agenda and I had no motivation to leak the investigation [document] to the media," he said in the statement. "I must rebut Legislator Wang's accusation that I am the mastermind behind this incident and that I conspired with individuals from the Ministry of Justices' Investigation Bureau to do it."

  Lo appealed to Next Magazine to reveal its source.

  The prosecutor stressed that he was willing to take a lie detector test to prove his innocence.

  Additional reporting by Rich Chang
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