Taiwan Water Co chairman Hsu Hsiang-kun (
Kaohsiung District Court ordered their detention following a request by the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors' Office.
Hsu is suspected of taking millions of dollars in kickbacks from contractors of major construction projects over the past two years via his special adviser Chen Tzu-kuo (陳茲國) and You Yii-der (游以德), an associate professor in the Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering at National Taiwan University, who serves as the chairman of a local environmental protection foundation, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said they started investigating the case after receiving tip offs last year.
They said they had discovered Hsu asked for kickbacks from bidders with the help of Chen and You. He also forced subordinates at the company to collude with him, the prosecutors said.
Chen and You, the company's chief engineer Lin Lien-mao (
The court denied the prosecutors' request to detain the environmental protection foundation's secretary Sun Ling-ling (孫玲玲) and accountant Kuo Hsiu-mei (郭秀美).
According to prosecutors, when contractors bid for a construction project, Hsu often charged them an additional "registration fee," of about 10 to 20 percent of the total budget for each construction project. Prosecutors said that Hsu and his associates had made more than NT$10 million (US$300,000) in this way.
When they searched Hsu's office early on Thursday, they found NT$1.5 million in cash, as well as US$60,000 and gold jewelry.
Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-shiang (施顏祥) said yesterday that Hsu would be suspended from both the chairmanship and his post as a Cabinet adviser, in keeping with the provisions of the Civil Servant Services Act (公務員服務法).
Police have issued warnings against traveling to Cambodia or Thailand when others have paid for the travel fare in light of increasing cases of teenagers, middle-aged and elderly people being tricked into traveling to these countries and then being held for ransom. Recounting their ordeal, one victim on Monday said she was asked by a friend to visit Thailand and help set up a bank account there, for which they would be paid NT$70,000 to NT$100,000 (US$2,136 to US$3,051). The victim said she had not found it strange that her friend was not coming along on the trip, adding that when she
TRAGEDY: An expert said that the incident was uncommon as the chance of a ground crew member being sucked into an IDF engine was ‘minuscule’ A master sergeant yesterday morning died after she was sucked into an engine during a routine inspection of a fighter jet at an air base in Taichung, the Air Force Command Headquarters said. The officer, surnamed Hu (胡), was conducting final landing checks at Ching Chuan Kang (清泉崗) Air Base when she was pulled into the jet’s engine for unknown reasons, the air force said in a news release. She was transported to a hospital for emergency treatment, but could not be revived, it said. The air force expressed its deepest sympathies over the incident, and vowed to work with authorities as they
A tourist who was struck and injured by a train in a scenic area of New Taipei City’s Pingsi District (平溪) on Monday might be fined for trespassing on the tracks, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday. The New Taipei City Fire Department said it received a call at 4:37pm on Monday about an incident in Shifen (十分), a tourist destination on the Pingsi Railway Line. After arriving on the scene, paramedics treated a woman in her 30s for a 3cm to 5cm laceration on her head, the department said. She was taken to a hospital in Keelung, it said. Surveillance footage from a
INFRASTRUCTURE: Work on the second segment, from Kaohsiung to Pingtung, is expected to begin in 2028 and be completed by 2039, the railway bureau said Planned high-speed rail (HSR) extensions would blanket Taiwan proper in four 90-minute commute blocs to facilitate regional economic and livelihood integration, Railway Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Cheng-chun (楊正君) said in an interview published yesterday. A project to extend the high-speed rail from Zuoying Station in Kaohsiung to Pingtung County’s Lioukuaicuo Township (六塊厝) is the first part of the bureau’s greater plan to expand rail coverage, he told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). The bureau’s long-term plan is to build a loop to circle Taiwan proper that would consist of four sections running from Taipei to Hualien, Hualien to
RSS