Taiwan has already become a democratic society, but after many years, our democratic grounding and our acceptance of the rule of law still truly need to be strengthened. In the United States , the penalty for insider trading, tax evasion or other illegal acts is extremely severe, so America 's spirit of abiding by the law is much better than ours, as is the law-abiding spirit of former British colonies Hong Kong and Singapore .

Taiwan has been profoundly influenced by Chinese authoritarian culture. During the period of martial law, the role of the rule of law was to turn big incidents into small ones, and to make small ones disappear. As a result, Taiwan has been left with a deeply rooted culture of graft, influence peddling, and manipulation, which have become accepted values that are ingrained in our daily behavior. So defending share prices and insider trading are cultural problems.

What we see every day are people using company assets for private gain, which does not meet corporate governance standards. There is no fairness, no transparency and no sense of accountability.

The subject the business community is talking about the most recently is corporate governance. The idea of governance is that it's everybody's business, and especially the government's ?V not just that of companies.

Destroying before Educating Creates Inequities

I believe that laws should be made with a spirit of tolerance but should be enforced strictly. Anybody who breaks the law should face a stiff penalty. But changing a culture requires a lot of communication over a long period of time. Destroying people before educating them may create many inequities.

When I was starting up my company, reversing preconceived social notions took a long time. You have to set an example and communicate over 10 to 30 years. It's definitely not a one- or two-year process. For a law to take effect, it needs to be made known and must go through a transition period.

So when it comes to investigating insider trading, the government should be clamping down on it, but you have to make sure you have strong evidence before indicting. You don't want to get to court and have there still be a lot of arguments. In fact, finding insider trading is straightforward ?V it's easy to judge.

The big insider trading cases that have surfaced recently in Taiwan also have educational significance. It's just that during the education process, the judiciary is making the final decision. If there's a problem, lawyers can debate it and have the judge make a ruling. When the verdict comes out, people should not imitate politicians, who always claim that rulings against them are the result of political interference.

That is precisely where the current chaos in society comes from ?V people have no concept of right and wrong. It's like insider trading cases. If somebody pulls strings, and the judiciary goes along with it and makes the issue go away, that's a serious problem.

In the case of insider trading, there are two very important things to note. Prosecutors should not casually detain and indict suspects. If the evidence is not very clear, then detaining and indicting suspects can do a lot of damage.

Also, when prosecutors organize a large-scale raid, it has a big impact on a company. From the point of view of securing evidence, however, it seems to be necessary. So the question is how to avoid sparking anxiety during the process of collecting evidence. This is very important. Investigators should be savvier when gathering evidence.

It is an iron rule that investigations should be confidential. Prosecutors must honor this principle, and they cannot use any excuses to absolve themselves of responsibility. It's just like with our many commercial secrets. Reporters spend their time trying to dig them out, but you simply can't tell them anything.

Many things are conceptual problems. We need to understand what's going on in the international community. If our civil servants don't have a relatively new way of thinking and are unclear about international affairs, then as companies compete around the world, the law and its interpretations won't be able to catch up.

Translated from the Chinese by Luke Sabatier

Chinese Version: 施振榮：偵查不公開應該是鐵律