The New Taipei City District Court sentenced a former garbage collector to two years in prison for embezzlement after the man stole 948 trash bags from his job, with the sentence suspended for five years.
The ruling can be appealed.
The man, surnamed Hung (洪), who worked at the Taipei Department of Environmental Protection, confessed to the theft of departmental trash bags to be used at his private enterprise, the court said.
Citing the prosecution, the court said that Hung had over the past two years obtained private contracts to dispose of garbage at two communities in New Taipei City’s Banciao (板橋) and Linkou (林口) districts.
In September 2019, he began to steal bags used by the department for road sweeping to transport trash from the communities to the office of his sanitation team in Taipei’s Wenshan District (文山), the court said.
Hung pocketed about four bags nearly every day during the period, which amounted to about NT$40,953 of stolen government property, it said.
The garbage bags were then incinerated alongside trash collected by sanitation workers in Taipei, it said.
Hung’s actions were revealed on April 27 last year, when New Taipei City Police Department officers and New Taipei City Environmental Protection Bureau inspectors stopped his privately owned truck on a road, it said.
Police found 33 departmental trash bags in the vehicle, including six that were filled with waste and 27 that had not been used, the court said.
Under the Anti-Corruption Act (貪污治罪條例), the theft of government property by a public servant is punishable by 10 years to life in prison, commutable to a fine, the court said.
The court gave Hung a lighter sentence as he had cooperated with prosecutors and as the value of the stolen items was low, it said.
It ordered Hung to pay a fine of NT$60,000 and perform 160 hours of compulsory labor as conditions for his suspended sentence.
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