The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the verdict handed down by the Taiwan High Court, acquitting former Tainan deputy mayor Hsu Yang-ming (許陽明) of corruption charges in relation to the use of a special allowance fund.
The final verdict made Hsu the first of a number of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) officials to clear his name after being accused by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of misusing special allowances. Political observers are now waiting to see if Hsu’s case will serve as a reference point in other trials involving former DPP officials.
The Supreme Court handed down the verdict on the grounds that Hsu “had no disposition” to embezzle from his special allowance, a fund allocated to executive officers at various levels to be spent at their discretion.
“I am not happy at all,” Hsu said after learning of the not-guilty verdict, saying he had suffered humiliation at the hands of prosecutors, as well as defamatory comments over a four year period that he said have damaged his reputation.
Hsu said that many in the court of public opinion found him guilty before he was given a chance to prove his innocence in court.
Likening the case to “death by a thousand cuts,” Hsu said it was “despicable” that prosecutors indicted him on corruption charges without a proper investigation.
The reasons stated on the indictment brought against him by prosecutors — namely that he sought reimbursement from the fund after leaving office and that part of the special allowance allocated to the city mayor was used to reimburse personal expenses — were false, Hsu said.
He alleged that he was indicted because prosecutors wanted to use his case as a counterbalance to the case brought against President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), then-chairman of the KMT, who was at the time indicted for siphoning funds from his special allowance fund when he was mayor of Taipei City from 1998 to 2006.
“The prosecutors used the judiciary as a political tool,” Hsu said.
Tainan City Councilor Hsieh Lung-chie (謝龍介) of the KMT filed a lawsuit against Hsu in 2006, accusing him of siphoning off special allowance funds into his personal account during his tenure as deputy mayor of Tainan City from 2002 to 2005 and using fraudulent receipts to claim reimbursements.
In the indictment, Hsu was charged by prosecutors with using 130 fraudulent receipts, including some from his wife, Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲), a DPP lawmaker, worth more than NT$310,000, to secure personal reimbursements from the special allowance fund.
The Tainan branch of the Taiwan High Court did not rule in the prosecutors’ favor, as the judges were of the opinion that whether an expense was eligible for reimbursement from the special allowance fund should be interpreted broadly, rather than narrowly restricting reimbursement to expenses incurred during work hours.
In Hsu’s case, Wang Hsiao-fang (王筱芳) and Huang Wen-chung (黃紋崇), his former secretary and bodyguard respectively, were also indicted by prosecutors on corruption charges, for allegedly providing receipts to enable Hsu to secure further reimbursements from the allowance fund.
Wang and Huang were also acquitted of the charges on Thursday as the Taiwan High Court invoked an “exemption clause,” expressing sympathy with their decision to provide personal receipts to help their employer obtain reimbursements, despite the problematic nature of the practice.
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