Taiwan's ex-president Chen gets life
By Asia Times Online staff
TAIPEI, Taiwan - Former Taiwan president Chen Shui-bian was sentenced to life
imprisonment and fined NT$200 million (US$6 million) on corruption charges by a
Taipei District Court on Friday, according to Taiwan media reports. Chen has
maintained his innocence and called the case "politically motivated".
The charges against Chen included embezzlement, accepting bribes and money
laundering during his two terms as Taiwan's leader from 2000 to 2008.
Prosecutors claimed in the trial that Chen took nearly US$15 million from state
coffers during his presidency and hid the graft with forged documents and
secret Swiss bank accounts.
An appeal is automatic, but it will be hard for Chen to overturn the conviction
"as he was convicted of many charges and the verdicts
were based on evidence, and not politics," Timothy Wong Ka-ying, associate
director of the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies at Chinese University of Hong
Kong, told Asia Times Online.
Prosecutors said last year that more than US$30 million of Chen family finances
were remitted to accounts in Singapore and the Cayman Islands, then moved to
Swiss bank accounts, according to Bloomberg. The former first family agreed to
return US$21 million to Taiwan, the report said.
In final statements, the prosecution accused Chen, 58, of having "acted
shamefully and with total lack of conscience", according to local media. His
wheelchair-bound wife, Wu Shu-chen, earlier convicted of perjury, was also
given a life sentence on Friday for corruption.
Eyewitnesses said hundreds of Chen's supporters protested outside the central
Taipei courtroom with banners reading "Chen's innocent" and "Free him". Still,
Chen had not been optimistic about Friday's verdict.
"I will be given the heaviest penalty, life imprisonment, and continue to be
held in detention," he told Taiwan's Apple Daily while in detention before the
trial. Chen has been detained since December. Chen said Thursday afternoon he
would not attend the court to hear the verdict, Taiwan-based United Evening
News reported.
Chen's stiff sentence was enhanced by the alleged scope of his abuse of power
and for his "uncooperative attitude toward a judicial probe", Hong Kong-based
Next Magazine reported, citing legal experts. Others see the event as a
benchmark ruling for Taiwan's judiciary.
"Issuing a verdict on Chen is very important to Taiwan because it is the time
to see if a corrupt official can be severely punished or [if] Taiwan's judicial
system is trustworthy," said Qiu Yi, a Kuomintang lawmaker, to local media.
Earlier this week, Chen's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) pledged to "spare
no efforts to support Chen", according to local media. Chen, long a
pro-independence advocate for Taiwan, has insisted the charges against him and
his family stemmed from Taiwan's current President Ma Ying-jeou, a vocal
proponent of improved ties with mainland China.
"Chen's possible conviction will spiritually deal a big blow to Taiwan's
pro-independence forces. Chen has always labeled himself as a pro-independence
forerunner, and the forerunner will probably spend the rest of his life in
prison," Wang Jianmin, of the Institute of Taiwan Studies of Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
Rise to the top
Born in 1951 in southern Taiwan to a poor sugarcane factory worker father and
an illiterate day laborer mother, Chen excelled academically and graduated in
law from the National Taiwan University in 1974.
As a young lawyer, Chen made a name for himself in 1979 with a prominent
defense of political dissidents jailed by Taiwan's then martial-law government.
This paved his route into the opposition DPP camp. Two years later, he was
elected to Taipei City council.
In January 1985, Chen was sentenced to a year in prison for libel while serving
as editor of the opposition magazine Neo-Formosa. While appealing the sentence,
he ran for county magistrate in Tainan, southern Taiwan. Three days after
losing the election, his wife was hit twice by a truck and left paralyzed from
the waist down.
Chen lost his appeal in May 1986 and began serving eight months in jail. In
1989, he was elected to the Legislative Yuan, or parliament. In his two terms
as legislator, from 1989-1994, Chen earned a reputation as an aggressive critic
of the ruling Kuomintang party (KMT).
In 1994, he became mayor of Taipei by a narrow margin. Four years later, the
KMT and New Party rallied behind a KMT candidate and thwarted his re-election.
Chen capitalized on an internal struggle within the KMT and a deeply divided
electorate to win a hard-fought presidential race in 2000. His main campaign
planks were cleaning up corruption and deepening Taiwan's de facto
independence.
Chen this week said he did not care what ruling was handed down and repeated
that he was the victim of "political persecution" by the KMT, according to the
Taipei Times.
"Let it be. At least my heart is free. Everything is changing now and I believe
there will be changes soon," he wrote in an article for the first issue of a
relaunched Neo Formosa Weekly, which resumed publication in electronic form on
Thursday. "What irony that Taiwan's democracy has regressed so much," the
Taipei Times report said.
The announcement of Chen's conviction came after the local stock market closed.
With a weekend for investors to digest the news, its impact on market sentiment
is likely to be limited, an analyst said, citing a strong earnings outlook as
companies at home and overseas restock inventories and on rising demand for
their products from China and other Asian countries.
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