The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said on Friday night that it had recently received US$1 million from Singaporean authorities who wired it from the account of broker Ching Chi-ju (金紀玖), funds embezzled in the high-profile Papua New Guinea diplomatic fraud case.
The latest installment brought the amount of money the ministry has recovered so far to more than US$5.5 million.
The Singapore High Court ruled in May that Ching, a self-styled diplomatic broker, should return the US$29.8 million he and accomplice Wu Shih-tsai (吳思材) received from MOFA in September 2006 to pave the way to establish diplomatic ties with Papua New Guinea.
Not long after the money was wired to the middlemen, the ministry found out that Papua New Guinea would not cut diplomatic relations with Beijing, but by the time the ministry demanded that the money be returned, Ching had disappeared.
Wu was detained in Taiwan and later sentenced to a 26-month jail term on forgery and defamation charges.
In 2008, the ministry filed a complaint against Ching and Wu with Singapore’s Supreme Court, demanding the return of the money. In February, the Singapore High Court ruled Ching’s assets be frozen, before ordering the return of the funds in May.
The latest US$1 million remitted to the ministry’s account was retrieved from Ching’s personal assets, MOFA said.
MOFA said that although Ching decided to file an appeal with the Singapore Supreme Court earlier this month, the move would not hinder its efforts to trace the rest of the money.
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
Death row inmate Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱), who was convicted for the double murder of his former girlfriend and her mother, is to be executed at the Taipei Detention Center tonight, the Ministry of Justice announced. Huang, who was a military conscript at the time, was convicted for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, surnamed Wang (王), and the murder of her mother, after breaking into their home on Oct. 1, 2013. Prosecutors cited anger over the breakup and a dispute about money as the motives behind the double homicide. This is the first time that Minister of Justice Cheng Ming-chien (鄭銘謙) has
SECURITY: To protect the nation’s Internet cables, the navy should use buoys marking waters within 50m of them as a restricted zone, a former navy squadron commander said A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed. Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year. Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of
TRANSPORT CONVENIENCE: The new ticket gates would accept a variety of mobile payment methods, and buses would be installed with QR code readers for ease of use New ticketing gates for the Taipei metro system are expected to begin service in October, allowing users to swipe with cellphones and select credit cards partnered with Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), the company said on Tuesday. TRTC said its gates in use are experiencing difficulty due to their age, as they were first installed in 2007. Maintenance is increasingly expensive and challenging as the manufacturing of components is halted or becoming harder to find, the company said. Currently, the gates only accept EasyCard, iPass and electronic icash tickets, or one-time-use tickets purchased at kiosks, the company said. Since 2023, the company said it
RSS