Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Kai3952/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
FORMER NANTOU COUNTY magistrate Lee Chao-ching, a former KMT member, was sentenced on charges totaling 656 years and four months in jail late last month. It has been confirmed by the Supreme Court that Lee, who is already in jail, will serve 21 years and two months in prison. Lee is 74 years old, meaning that Lee may spend the rest of his life in prison.
Charges facing Lee are mostly regarding kickbacks for reconstruction projects after Typhoon Morakot, which struck Taiwan in August 2009.
Lee reportedly demanded 10% in kickbacks for reconstruction projects, which were passed to him in gift boxes of tea and fruit. This was particularly the case regarding road and bridge projects, with Lee and associates forging documents instead of applying for public funds, and colluding to rig tenders for projects to award them to favored developers.
The Supreme Court found Lee guilty of receiving 9.46 million NT in kickbacks in 2018, though some of the charges then faced by Lee were sent back to lower-level courts for second-instance trials. Of 94 charges sent back for retrial, some were merged into other charges, some were thrown out, and some charges Lee was acquitted of due to insufficient evidence.
Lee was also implicated in corruption for public infrastructure projects that were not directly related to reconstruction after Typhoon Morakot. An example included demanding kickbacks of 16,000 NT for a street sewer repair project in Puli Township. More broadly, given his corruption regarding post-Typhoon Morakot reconstruction, Lee can be seen as a politician that stands at the intersection of crony capitalism and disaster capitalism in the Taiwanese context.
Photo credit: Fcuk1203/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
In 2013, prosecutors stated that Lee received between 10% and 15% in kickbacks for almost all Nantou county public projects since his second term as Nantou county magistrate began in 2008. Lee served as Nantou county magistrate from December 2005 to November 2012, reportedly becoming more brazen in his actions during his second term.
Lee was removed from office in 2012 while being investigated. The Control Yuan voted by eleven to one to impeach him in September 2013. Ma administration officials, including the then-premier Jiang Yi-huah, stated that they supported the rulings against Lee.
The most recent sentencing of Lee proves an increase from 2022, when Lee faced 450 years in jail.
It is not likely that the KMT will invest any political capital in defending Lee, seeing as the Ma administration also backed his removal from office over a decade ago. This proves different from how the KMT defended Yilan county magistrate Lin Zi-miao in the last election cycle. Lin was recently removed from office on corruption charges after being sentenced to 12.5 years in jail.
Similarly, KMT and TPP politicians have defended former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je, the founder of the TPP, at a time when Ko faces 28.5 years in jail on corruption charges linked to the Core Pacific City Mall. Ko is accused of taking bribes to allow Core Pacific to expand the mall’s floor area ratio.
With both Lin and Ko, the pan-Blue camp has leaned into claims that the DPP is engaged in a “Green Terror” targeting political opponents. Particularly with Ko, who built up his political career as Taipei mayor with the aim of eventually running for president, it proves noteworthy that dynamics normally confined to local politics have been elevated to the national level at present. This is particularly the case with regard to the KMT’s efforts to block the national budget.
But this may not surprise, seeing as the KMT’s caucus leader is Fu Kun-chi. Fu, a former Hualien county magistrate, was previously jailed on charges of insider trading and bribing the media. When Fu was to be jailed, he divorced his wife, Hsu Chen-wei, and named her deputy county commissioner so that she would become acting county commissioner once he was in prison, so that she could continue to rule Hualien in his stead. Such dynamics of local-level corruption have risen to the highest level of Taiwanese politics as of late, though normally confined to outside of the Taipei-based politics of the KMT’s mainlander leadership.