TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) on Thursday (Feb. 2) announced that Liechtenstein has transferred NT$330 million (US$11.11 million) to Taiwan, which it seized from the family of the late arms dealer Andrew Wang (汪傳浦), who had been involved in the Lafayette scandal.
The money was transferred to an account opened by the Taipei District Prosecutors Office for confiscation. This marks the first batch of funds recovered by the Taiwan government following a series of corruption scandals that shocked Taiwan in the 1990s.
Wang had been accused of accepting NT$14.46 billion in kickbacks in the Lafayette scandal, which was deposited in several countries. According to the MOJ, Wang and his family became wanted after fleeing Taiwan, though charges against Wang were dropped after his death in the U.K. in 2015.
In 2021, a court ruling made in Switzerland, where most of Wang’s kickbacks were deposited, declared that nearly NT$7.4 billion of funds from the Wang family’s frozen accounts will be returned to Taiwan. Other funds that are still in the Wang family's Switzerland accounts, amounting to nearly NT$20 billion, would be unfrozen as their connection to the Lafayette case had not been proven.
The Lafayette scandal is the biggest corruption scandal involving the Taiwan military since its establishment. Aside from enormous amounts of kickbacks, the case also involved over a dozen deaths that remain unsolved to this day.