Ex-minister Lin responds to Jin Wen corruption charges

Lin said the house prosecutors deemed as a bribe from Jin Wen High School was actually bought with his own money — over NT$16.69 million.

Lin, along with 32 other education officials, business executives, and a legislator, was indicted Tuesday in a case where the officials allegedly bent the rules to allow Jin Wen to expand its classes without sufficient facilities.

The Taipei District Prosecutors Office is seeking the heaviest penalty — life imprisonment — for Lin, compared to the other co-defendants in the case.

Denying the charges at a press conference yesterday, Lin said the reasons the prosecutors cited were “absurd and ridiculous.”

He accused the prosecutors of “working on presumptions and stacking up the charges,” as they simply ignored the evidence he presented to prove his innocence.

He said the reasons the prosecutors cited in the indictment were that as director of Taipei City’s Education Bureau, he illegally helped Jin Wen expand classes, and helped Jin Wen Group boss, Chang Wen-li, swindle the school’s assets.

The prosecutors also accused him of illegally helping upgrade Jin Wen Junior College into a technology institute — another school owned by Chang’s group.

According to the indictment, Lin pointed out, he was offered a cheap price for a house in a luxury community Chang developed for a reward.

Lin said he actually signed the purchase contract for the house in March 1990, but the Jin Wen class expansion was approved in June 1992.

The prosecutors said Jin Wen should not have been allowed to expand because it did not have enough land.

But Lin said a lack of space was common for Taipei’s schools, and the approval of the Jin Wen case was nothing special, and it followed education policy at the time.

The application for the upgrading of the junior college, according to Lin, was processed between 1996 and 2000.

Although at that time Lin was the vice education minister, he said technology schools did not fall under his jurisdiction, and therefore he could not have interfere with the application.

He said he was being persecuted by the Democratic Progressive Party government, with which he said he had been at odds for a long time.

He said the DPP government was targeting him to frighten others into cooperating with the ruling party.

He said his relations with a certain government official turned sour shortly before he left the Education Ministry, and that official was so powerful that she demanded the authorities pursue the Jin Wen case.

Lin did not name the official, but it was widely taken to refer to Vice Education Minister Fan Sun-lu.

Fan yesterday refused to comment on Lin’s allegations.

Co-defendants in the case include former Education Minister Kirby Yung and former State Minister Chang Yu-huei.

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