Chuang Chou-wen, among 32 charged with money laundering

A billionaire was among 32 people indicted by Taichung prosecutors yesterday for running an online gambling platform and allegedly engaging in money laundering, earning illicit gains of more than NT$59.4 billion (US$2.1 billion).

Chuang Chou-wen (莊周文), chairman of Taichung-based Xinliwang International Holdings Co Ltd (新力旺國際控股公司), and 31 of his employees have been charged with gambling, engaging in organized criminal activity and tax evasion by the Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office.

The 50-year-old has been detained since his arrest in November last year.

After he was arrested, prosecutors confiscated all of the assets found under his name, including 13 luxury vehicles, NT$1.2 billion and US$2.65 million in cash, and 41 properties worth NT$1.3 billion, to prevent him from moving or liquidating the allegedly ill-gotten gains prior to trial.

According to the indictment, Chuang runs the Xinliwang Group, which owns 12 companies that have jointly operated an online gambling platform called “GPK Bet” since 2014.

The platform featured 532 online gambling sites and 54 online gambling system providers.

Investigators busted Chuang’s operation in January last year, when they found that an office building in Taichung was being used as a money-laundering center to transfer high volumes of money in and out of different accounts held by gamblers, many of them in China.

Investigators traced the cash flow and found that it led to Chuang’s group.

The platform processed NT$123 billion in bets from 2014 to January last year, prosecutors said, adding that incoming and outgoing funds were handled in part through 843 dummy accounts in China.

The platform allegedly used underground banks to move the profits earned from its online gambling business back to Taiwan in batches.

Through this informal transfer system, Chuang and his company earned an illicit profit of more than NT$59.4 billion and allegedly evaded taxes of about NT$266 million, the indictment said.