Zhou Dianlun, the speaker of Pingtung County Council in southern Taiwan and a member of the Kuomintang, the main opposition party, was sentenced to three years and four months in prison by the Kaohsiung Branch of the Taiwan High Court in a retrial ruling handed down Friday, the Taipei Times reported. The court also imposed a fine of NT$1.5 million and stripped Zhou of his civil rights for five years.
The charge against Zhou stems from Taiwan’s Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Act, which criminalizes the payment of bribes to induce individuals to sign petition forms supporting a particular presidential candidate. In Taiwan’s electoral system, an independent candidate seeking to run for president must first collect a minimum number of citizen signatures, known as petition endorsements, before their name can appear on the ballot. In 2023, Gou Tai-ming, better known internationally as Terry Gou, the billionaire founder of Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, sought to mount an independent presidential bid and needed to reach that threshold.
Sentence cut on appeal, extended at retrial
The Pingtung District Court convicted Zhou at trial and sentenced him to four years in prison, along with a NT$5 million fine and a six-year suspension of civil rights.
Zhou appealed for a lighter sentence; prosecutors appealed for a heavier one. In April of last year, the Kaohsiung Branch of the Taiwan High Court reduced the sentence on second appeal to three years and two months, cutting the fine to NT$1.5 million and the civil rights suspension to five years. The Supreme Court then vacated that ruling in December, finding that the facts had not been adequately investigated and that legal questions remained unresolved, and sent the case back for retrial.
According to the Central News Agency, the second-appeal judgment found that Zhou had funneled the NT$5 million in installments to Zhou Pinquan, the township mayor of Chaozhou in Pingtung County, with instructions to recruit signatories through a pyramid scheme: NT$5,000 for every ten endorsement forms collected. The township mayor accepted a deferred prosecution agreement in that matter.
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Zhou’s defense: the money was a personal incentive
Zhou Dianlun maintained throughout proceedings that the money he gave to the township mayor was personal funds intended to motivate Zhou Pinquan to work harder at organizing legitimate petition drives. He argued that when the mayor reported difficulties collecting signatures, he suggested the pyramid-style outreach as a way to expand reach through social networks, with explicit instructions that cash was not to be handed directly to anyone who signed.
The district court rejected that defense entirely. It convicted Zhou under the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Act and sentenced him to four years, imposed a NT$5 million fine, suspended his civil rights for six years, and ordered the forfeiture of NT$4,932,000 in alleged bribe money.
The Kaohsiung High Court, on second appeal, found the factual basis for the full sentence partially deficient. The Supreme Court vacated that ruling, citing unresolved legal questions, and returned the case to the Kaohsiung court for retrial. The retrial added two months to the prior appellate sentence, settling on three years and four months.
