8-Term Tainan Councilor Tsai Shu-hui Receives Suspended Sentence in Assistant Fee Fraud Case

Central News Agency (Tainan, 28th) Kuomintang Tainan City Councilor Tsai Shu-hui, who has served eight terms, was involved in a case of embezzling public assistant fees. The first instance court sentenced her to 2 years in prison with a 5-year probation. The Tainan District Prosecutors Office appealed, but the Tainan Branch of the Taiwan High Court rejected the appeal today, upholding the original verdict. The case can still be appealed.

According to the Tainan District Prosecutors Office, during her tenure as a Tainan City Councilor from October 2009 to December 2016, Tsai conspired with a defendant surnamed Huang and two assistants surnamed Tsai and Hsu to falsely report the number of public assistants or inflate their salaries to the Tainan City Council, embezzling a total of NT$5,331,012 in public assistant subsidies.

Tsai and the other three were charged with using their positions to embezzle property under the Anti-Corruption Act and for causing public servants to make false entries in official documents. The Tainan District Prosecutors Office indicted them according to the law. Because Tsai voluntarily returned the proceeds of the crime during the investigation, the prosecution recommended that the court consider this and impose an appropriate sentence.

Tsai, 59, served as a councilor for the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th terms of the Tainan City Council before the merger of Tainan County and City, and has been re-elected for four terms since the merger. In 2019, she was nominated by the Kuomintang to run for the Legislative Yuan in Tainan's 5th district but lost to the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party legislator Lin Chun-hsien.