The Taiwan High Court yesterday upheld a not guilty verdict for the former chairman and vice chairman of United Microelectronics Corp (UMC) on charges of breach of trust and violations of accounting laws over investments in a Chinese firm.
Former chairman Robert Tsao (曹興誠) and former vice chairman John Hsuan (宣明智), as well as Cheng Tun-chien (鄭敦謙), head of Fortune Venture Capital Corp, an affiliate of UMC, had originally been acquitted by the Hsinchu District Court and the Taiwan High Court.
REHEAR
The Supreme Court had requested that the Taiwan High Court rehear the case.
Prosecutors yesterday said they had yet to decide whether to once again take the case to the Supreme Court.
The trio were indicted on charges of breach of trust and violating the Business Accounting Act (商業會計法) by helping UMC, the world’s second-biggest contract chipmaker, invest in China’s He Jian Technology (Suzhou) Co without first obtaining the approval of shareholders.
SUPPORT
In its ruling, the High Court said there was insufficient evidence to determine how much UMC had lost through the investment. In an addition, at the conclusion of UMC’s annual shareholders conference in 2005, shareholders had expressed their support for the investment, saying it was in UMC’s interest, the ruling said.
It also said the trio did not violate the Business Accounting Act.
Tsao, who at one point had told the court that prosecutors had abused their powers by indicting him and were wasting everyone’s time by repeatedly appealing the case, said after yesterday’s ruling that he had regained his confidence in the nation’s judiciary.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: