Taiwan Court Okays Seizure Of $400M In Lafayette Frigate Scam

The Supreme Court has granted a request to seize over $400 million in funds from the heirs of Andrew Wang, an arms broker at the center of a scandal involving the Taiwan Navy's purchase of Lafayette frigates from France in the 1990s.

Photo Insert: A Taiwan Navy Lafayette frigatte

In a ruling issued Thursday, the court upheld the approval of a seizure petition by the Taiwan High Prosecutors Office, after dismissing an appeal by Wang's widow and children, who currently hold the assets in Swiss bank accounts.

The controversy surrounding Wang stemmed from his role as a representative of France's Thomson-CSF (now Thales), which partnered with a French state-owned shipyard in 1991 to sell six Lafayette-class frigates to Taiwan's Navy for $2.8 billion, Hsiao Po-wen and Matthew Mazzetta reported for Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA).

Wang is believed to have facilitated the deal by managing hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to figures in both countries, including a $17 million payment to former Taiwan Navy Captain Kuo Li-heng, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2014.

After coming under suspicion, Wang fled Taiwan for the United Kingdom in 1993, where he died in 2015, leaving millions of dollars still frozen in Swiss bank accounts.

In an effort to recover some of the funds, Taiwan passed a legal revision in 2016 that allowed courts to order the confiscation of allegedly illegal profits without a criminal conviction or sentence.

Under the revised law, the now-disbanded Special Investigation Division of the Supreme Prosecutors Office filed a request with the Taipei District Court to seize a total of $960 million from Wang's widow Yeh Hsiu-chen, their four children, and three companies under their control.

The Taiwan High Prosecutors Office uncovered $400 million in previously unknown assets, which Wang's family members had deposited in Swiss accounts.

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