News

10 December 2009

 

Ex-Procomp chair begins 14-year jail term

The China Post reports that Sophie Yeh, former chairwoman of Taiwan’s Procomp Informatics Ltd, has begun serving a 14-year term at the womens jail in Taoyuan County based on a final verdict by the Supreme Court at the end of November. This upholds an original verdict by the Shihlin District Court in December 2005 for her role in a NT$7bn accounting fraud and embezzlement of Procomp assets. The district court also imposed a fine of NT$180m on Yeh.

During the police investigation, Yeh was ordered to return slightly more than NT$10m. The entire amount in Yeh’s embezzlement is still to be determined. In what is one of the most severely punished cases of accounting fraud in Taiwan, says the China Post, the prosecutor also convicted 27 other Procomp executives.

Procomp was once Taiwan’s largest manufacturer of gallium arsenide chips for wireless communications applications. The scandal was revealed after the firm filed a restructuring plan in summer 2004 amid financial difficulties, as it defaulted on a bond payment of NT$6.3bn that June. More than 10,000 victims lodged damage claims for a total of NT$6bn. Because of the accounting fraud, Procomp was delisted from the local bourse in September 2004 (after becoming a listed company in 2000).

According to law, a convict can apply for parole when half of the jail-time has been served. However, prosecutors at the Shihlin office say that Yeh must serve a minimum of seven years, with the condition that she has paid the NT$180m penalty before being elligible for parole. If she fails to pay the fine, Yeh could serve an additional three-year term.

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