Taipei prosecutors yesterday announced that tycoon Wang Yu-yun (王玉雲) had been placed on the nation's wanted list after he failed to show up to begin his seven-year prison term.
"Wang has been placed on Taiwan's wanted list," Taipei District Prosecutors Office spokesman Lin Jinn-tsun (林錦村) said yesterday.
On April 26, Wang, the former president of Chung Shing Commercial Bank (中興銀行), received a seven-year jail sentence after being convicted of misusing the bank's funds. He was found guilty of mismanaging bad loans valued at more than NT$80 billion (US$2.4 billion).
Prosecutors issued a notice to Wang last month ordering him to report for his incarceration, but Wang failed to show up at the proper time yesterday.
Wang, a senior Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) member and Kaohsiung mayor from 1973 to 1981, was indicted in 2000 and has been prohibited from leaving the country since 2002.
Financial officers said that Wang had transferred most of his assets to China and other countries before facing prosecutors.
Lin said yesterday that Wang likely had fled to China after he was sentenced in April.
Prosecutors suspect Wang may have fled to China by boat.
The judicial system has come under fire for allowing convicted criminals -- especially white-collar ones -- to roam freely.
Minister of Justice Morley Shih (施茂林) said that agents from the ministry's Investigation Bureau who were in charge of monitoring Wang would be held responsible for his failure to appear for incarceration.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test