Saturday 13 December 2008

Top prosecutor sorry for Chen Shui-bian

He felt sorry for former President Chen Shui-bian, who made him the nation’s top prosecutor, had to be indicted by the Special Counsel for corruption and money laundering.

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Guanyu said...

Top prosecutor sorry for Chen Shui-bian

The China Post news staff
13 December 2008

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- “It’s a pity,” Procurator-General Chen Tsung-ming said yesterday.

He felt sorry for former President Chen Shui-bian, who made him the nation’s top prosecutor, had to be indicted by the Special Counsel for corruption and money laundering.

Eight prosecutors of the Special Counsel, which is placed under control by the prosecutor-general, are continuing to investigate President Chen’s involvement in a number of other graft cases.

“When President Chen was inaugurated in 2000,” Chen Tsung-ming said, “all of us believed he would bring about a clean, corruption-free government.”

No one suspected President Chen and his family would be so deeply involved in corruption and graft over the eight years he ruled Taiwan.

“I feel very sorry for President Chen,” said the procurator-general, who called a press conference to announce the indictment of the former first family.

Chen Tsung-ming admitted he had been under extreme pressure while directing the Special Counsel probe for more than three months.

At one time, he confessed, he almost decided to resign because he was maligned. President Chen’s opponents blamed the prosecutor in chief for “interfering with the Special Counsel investigation” to “shield” his “benefactor.”

He visited the Special Counsel daily for four days in a row prior to the indictment. Opponents said he was trying to force his prosecutors to ask for “lenient punishment.”

The procurator-general was vindicated. His Special Counsel demand “severest possible punishment” for “the very serious crimes” the Chen family has committed.

It’s almost a repetition of his first encounter with Chen Shui-bian.

In the summer of 1986, Chen Tsung-ming recalled, Chen Shui-bian was a Taipei city councilman convicted of libel and sentenced to eight months in prison.

The city councilor and two other defendants demanded they report to Chen Tsung-ming, then a chief district prosecutor, in advance of their going to jail.

“They demanded they be bused, too,” the procurator-general reminisced. “But I turned them down,” he added. The confrontation continued overnight and Chen Shui-bian and his two fellow convicts came on foot to report to the prosecutor according to schedule.

“So I wasn’t surprised when President Chen resorted to such ploys as claiming he was beaten up by court police, demanding he be checked up for injury at hospital, and going on a hunger strike to get out of the detention house for hospital treatment,” Chen Tsung-ming told reporters.

And he thanked all eight prosecutors of his Special Counsel for working overtime for days on end to complete writing up 209 pages of the indictment.