Australian newspaper The Age reported on Wednesday that the Chinese defector Wang Liqiang was allegedly threatened to retract his story about spying for China and influencing Taiwan's elections.
Kuomintang Deputy Secretary-General Alex Tsai, who was suspected of attempting to coerce Wang into recording a video against the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), promptly dismissed the allegations in a press conference today.
"I've never asked him (Wang) to release any statement," Tsai said to the press, declining that he has ever conducted any inappropriate behavior.
Tsai, along with a China-based businessman Sun Tianqun, has allegedly sent Wang a script to accuse the DPP of bribing him to lie about China's influence campaigns in Taiwan. If such a video was publicized, it could be detrimental to both the DPP and incumbent President Tsai Ing-wen in the January 11 elections.
According to The Age, sources revealed that Tsai has offered to resolve Wang's debts and allow him to freely settle in Taiwan in return for his cooperation. Sun, however, has allegedly gone as far as to warning Wang that he could be sent back to China and killed, and that his family in China could be punished if he refused to cooperate.
During the press conference today, Tsai released recordings of his call with Wang as well as an audio clip of the phone interview between "his friend" Sun and The Age journalist Alex Joske. Tsai declined the accusation of threatening Wang and stressed that he was extremely relaxed when he was speaking to Wang.
In one of the audio recordings, Sun claimed that Wang had admitted to having received "a large sum of money" from the DPP to confess about his spying. However, Tsai insisted that he has never heard of such a statement from Wang himself, also implying that he was only the messenger between Sun and Wang.
Tsai said the messages published by The Age, which detailed his discussion of the script for Wang's video statement, were not from him because he would never type in simplified Chinese characters.
DPP representatives later slammed Tsai for circumventing the truth and failing to refute the allegations.
"We demand Alex Tsai to clarify the facts and release all records to the public," said Kuan Bi-ling, a DPP party list legislative candidate.
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TNL Editor: Lea Yang (@thenewslensintl)
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