If you can get past the clunky English and numerous misspelled words, Top 10 Financial Fraud Investigation Records is a fascinating compendium on some of the top financial crimes that have rocked Taiwan, starting from the 10th Credit Cooperative of Taipei (北市十信) case in 1985 to last year’s Mega International Commercial Bank (兆豐銀行) scandal.
And by the way, there are actually 12 cases — not 10 of the title.
Published by the Taipei District Prosecutor’s Office archive, the book offers detailed information about each case with news photos, news clippings, graphics, court documents along with some picturesque spreads of Taiwan’s scenery. The narrative is lively albeit sometimes bogged down with minute details (necessary for this kind of book) and most of the chapters end with a quote from each case’s prosecutor, which offers additional insight. The layout is also well-designed and easily readable.
The problem is the English. It’s not so bad that the text is unreadable, but any English-speaker will balk at the questionable grammar that plagues the book from the very beginning. Take, as an example, this sentence from the very first paragraph in the introduction: “Prosecutors of this office shoulder the responsibility without hesitation and dedicate their professional expertise to provide best service to the country disregard any hardship.”
The stories are interesting enough to continue reading, but one has to wonder how phrases like “preparing to a flee plan” and “began started his manipulation to steal money” could make it past the final review.
Even more atrocious are the spelling mistakes — basketball “frantic,” “forth” in place of fourth, “econoic” instead of economic, and so on. Some of these mistakes are simply inexcusable, such as spelling the office’s own name wrong (Taipei “Districit” Prosecutor’s Office) and misspelling Enron as “Anron” for two entire pages despite the fact that the second page featured a (correctly spelled) poster for the American documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Also, there’s no excuse to spell Qing Dynasty as “Qin,” as there is another dynasty that follows the latter spelling.
The romanization is also inconsistent, as most of the book follows Hanyu Pinyin but other methods slip in here and there. For example, Changhua is spelled ZhangHwa, which does not entirely fit any system. Some sentences also get cut off and continue on in the next paragraph. It’s obvious that whoever proofread this book was sure not doing their job — if the book was even proofread at all. To make things worse, many of the photos — even recent ones credited to various newspapers — are inexplicably pixelated or blurry.
Back to the positives. Despite being detailed official records, they are written like pulp crime fiction (some chapters do this better than others). For example, in chapter 2, the criminals are introduced as “The God President,” “The God of Wealth” and “The Golden Solicitor.” Another chapter begins by detailing the perpetrator getting out of jail, kneeling and bowing three times and jumping into a black van, “disappearing into the traffic on the highway.” There are also pop culture references, with one chapter comparing the criminal’s dealings from prison to Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption. The introduction contains a quote from Mario Puzo.
Each case is extremely detailed and leaves few holes, from the history of each company involved in the crime, indictment, trial and aftermath. Some of it ends up reading like a list because of the sheer number of names involved (one business had more than 70 subsidiaries), but again it’s better to have all the information in than have something missing, as this is not a novel but more of an official record. However, perhaps it would have been helpful to explain some of the financial crime terms such as “wash sale” and “short straddle.”
The prosecutor’s notes are always interesting, as they detail what was going through his or her mind during the case. For example, Chapter 4 ends with the prosecutor detailing the risk he took by returning the confiscated promissory notes to the bank before the defendant’s indictment.
“When a case like this happen[s] and the economic order [is] in peril, a prosecutor should take every factor into account and [try] to make the best choice[s] for the public,” he writes.
It is very unfortunate that this quality content that undoubtedly required a lot of work is sullied by the poor English. The book’s introduction states that it is the first in a series that will also feature the top corruption cases, sexual assault cases and so on. Let’s hope that the office hires a native English translator and proofreader for its following issues.
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