A billionaire was among 32 people indicted by Taichung prosecutors yesterday for running an online gambling platform and allegedly engaging in money laundering, earning illicit gains of more than NT$59.4 billion (US$2.1 billion).
Chuang Chou-wen (莊周文), chairman of Taichung-based Xinliwang International Holdings Co Ltd (新力旺國際控股公司), and 31 of his employees have been charged with gambling, engaging in organized criminal activity and tax evasion by the Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office.
The 50-year-old has been detained since his arrest in November last year.
After he was arrested, prosecutors confiscated all of the assets found under his name, including 13 luxury vehicles, NT$1.2 billion and US$2.65 million in cash, and 41 properties worth NT$1.3 billion, to prevent him from moving or liquidating the allegedly ill-gotten gains prior to trial.
According to the indictment, Chuang runs the Xinliwang Group, which owns 12 companies that have jointly operated an online gambling platform called “GPK Bet” since 2014.
The platform featured 532 online gambling sites and 54 online gambling system providers.
Investigators busted Chuang’s operation in January last year, when they found that an office building in Taichung was being used as a money-laundering center to transfer high volumes of money in and out of different accounts held by gamblers, many of them in China.
Investigators traced the cash flow and found that it led to Chuang’s group.
The platform processed NT$123 billion in bets from 2014 to January last year, prosecutors said, adding that incoming and outgoing funds were handled in part through 843 dummy accounts in China.
The platform allegedly used underground banks to move the profits earned from its online gambling business back to Taiwan in batches.
Through this informal transfer system, Chuang and his company earned an illicit profit of more than NT$59.4 billion and allegedly evaded taxes of about NT$266 million, the indictment said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,