Taipei, Dec. 14 (CNA) The opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against five people, including the head of the nation's top economic planning agency, for forgery and violating the election law by attempting to hurt the chances of its presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen in the Jan. 14 election. The DPP threatened a day earlier to sue Christina Liu, minister of the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD), if she didn't apologize for implicating Tsai in connection with a government decision to invest in the biotech company TaiMed Inc. while Tsai was vice premier in 2007. The DPP went ahead with the lawsuit despite Liu's statement Tuesday night that she was sorry for causing a controversy over the date of a meeting regarding the establishment of TaiMed in cooperation with the U.S. firm Genentech. The DPP said that the CEPD file given to lawmakers showed that Tsai was among the initiators of the TaiMed company when a meeting to raise capital was held March 31, 2007. However, the meeting actually took place in August that year, and the file was dated Aug. 31, but Tsai had already left the Cabinet in May, the DPP said. Liu explained Tuesday that the mistake was due to her staff having had to sort through many files within a short period of time. The three ruling Kuomintang legislators named in the suit are Chiu Yi, Hsieh Kuo-liang and Lin Yi-shih. Chiu was sued for saying that Tsai had abused her position and lied, and for alleging that Tsai had not put her family's money into the company, but rather had used state funds to help finance TaiMed. Both Lin and Hsieh were sued for citing incorrect information provided by Liu. Tsai Ling-yi, wife of Premier Wu Den-yih, was also named as a defendant for alleging in a campaign rally in the outlying island of Penghu Sunday that Tsai Ing-wen had channeled NT$1.1 billion of government fund into her "family's company" and that "it's dumb to donate piggy banks to them," referring to the DPP's campaign fundraising. Tsai Huang-liang, DPP legislative whip, said at a news conference earlier in the day that Liu knew Tsai Ing-wen was not among the major leaders of TaiMed but had deliberately forged a document to try to incriminate her and hurt her chances of winning the presidential election. "Liu should step down and prosecutors should take the initiative to investigate the matter," said Tsai Huang-liang. In response, Liu issued a statement Wednesday, dismissing the DPP allegation that she had acted as a Tsai-basher for the ruling party in the runup to the presidential election. Liu said she had not touched the information previously and had only sorted through it at the request of the Legislature to clarify Tsai Ing-wen's role in the birth of the company. "I wish the public would not politicize the issue, as I've not compromised my administrative neutrality," Liu said. KMT lawmaker Chiu said "this is an old gambit by the DPP to try to shift focus of the case." Lin and Hsieh also said that it is time for Tsai Ing-wen to honestly explain why she had quit the vice premier job to become TaiMed chairwoman. Meanwhile, Premier Wu said his wife's remarks were not groundless, as the government investment in TaiMed was even bigger than she had said. Four days before the March 22, 2008 election, the DPP administration approved an investment of NT$875 million in the company, but the money was not appropriated after the KMT administration took over, Wu said. (By Lin Sheng-hsu, Wen Kuei-hsiang and Lilian Wu)
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