The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office on Tuesday dropped a charge of share price manipulation against Mike Xu (許雅鈞), husband of talk show hostess Dee Hsu (徐熙娣, better known as Little S) in relation to the Top Pot Bakery scandal last year.
The Top Pot Bakery chain — which Hsu had endorsed and in which Xu held shares — caused public anger in late August last year when it admitted that it used artificial flavoring in products it advertised as “all natural.”
While prosecutors investigated the Top Pot Bakery on suspicion of fraud, they discovered that its parent company, Genome International, allegedly violated the insider trading clause of the Securities Exchange Act (證券交易法).
On Jan. 28 this year, Xu, his father, Xu Ching-hsiang (許慶祥), and two others were indicted by prosecutors on charges of insider trading. The case is being processed by the Taipei District Court.
Meanwhile, given that Genome International’s share value rose sharply from September 2012 to March last year, from NT$62 to NT$206 per share, prosecutors launched a separate probe into whether Genome International was involved in illegally boosting its share price.
According to prosecutors on Tuesday, as the major shareholder of the company, Mike Xu did not sell or buy shares in large transactions during the stock’s surge.
The share value increase coincided with an upturn of stock value in the biotechnology sector and there was no evidence of deliberate manipulation and insider trading, so the charge of share price manipulation was dropped, prosecutors said.
Additional reporting by Chien Li-chung
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