Taiwan prosecutors on Wednesday appealed against the acquittal of Ma Ying-jeou on corruption charges, prolonging a legal threat to the presidential bid of the opposition Kuomintang candidate.
“We have asked the Supreme Court to look into this case because we believe that Mr Ma’s acquittal violates the law,” said Honda Chen, chief secretary of the Taiwan High Court Prosecutors Office.
The Supreme Court’s ruling would be final. If it were to reverse the acquittal before the presidential election scheduled for March 22, Mr Ma could be legally barred from running. This would force the KMT, which has surged mainly due to Mr Ma’s personal popularity, without a credible candidate late in the race, virtually securing victory for Frank Hsieh, Mr Ma’s opponent from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
However, Mr Ma’s lawyers and independent observers said the risk of a guilty verdict was low, given that prosecutors cannot introduce new evidence or charges.
The Taiwan High Court last month found Mr Ma not guilty of charges of corruption and breach of trust, confirming a lower court verdict. Prosecutors had accused the KMT politician, whom most opinion polls rank as the favourite to win the presidency, of embezzling more than T$11m in discretionary funds during his time as mayor of Taipei.
Mr Ma has not denied that he had a mayoral allowance directly wired into his personal account every month and spent part of it for personal purposes. But he has argued that such allowances should be viewed as part of his personal income. The court agreed with that argument.
The case has wider relevance because thousands of central and local government officials in Taiwan are paid such allowances in addition to their salaries, and dozens of prominent politicians, including President Chen Shui-bian, are being probed for alleged misuse, with prosecutors taking different views on the allowances’ nature.
Mr Chen said: “We disagree with the court’s position that administrative practice has been established that clearly defines those allowances as private income, because there have been many officials who spent those allowances on public purposes only, and who returned all those funds which they hadn’t used up.”
He said prosecutors would take the Supreme Court’s final verdict in the Ma case as its standard in future investigations relating to officials allowances.
