Taiwan's former president Chen Shui-bian has been barred from leaving the country as an investigation into allegations of money laundering expanded, media reports said Sunday, dpa reported.
Late Saturday, prosecutors stopped Chen and his brother-in-law Wu Ching-mao from going abroad, after searching Chen's home and office and Wu's home earlier in the day, the China Post reported.
Investigators claimed to have found details of four secret bank accounts opened in 2000, the year Chen won the presidential election.
The four accounts hold a total of 500 million Taiwan dollars (16 million US dollars), which Chen's wife Wu Shu-chen insisted were family savings.
The Supreme Prosecutor's Office launched the probe after Chen admitted at a news conference Thursday that his wife had remitted 20 million US dollars into a Swiss bank account this January without telling him. He claimed this was done in preparation for their possible retirement abroad.
Chen said the money was from campaign funds that he had failed to declare. But prosecutors are trying to determine if the couple was attempting to launder illegally-obtained money.
According to local media, Chen's wife used the bank accounts of her elder brother Wu Ching-mao, her son Chen Chih-chung and daughter-in-law Huang Jui-ching to transfer money to a Swiss bank account.
The money laundering scandal has dealt a crushing blow to Chen's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which lost its eight-year grip on power to the pro-China Kuomintang (KMT) party in the March 22 election.
Even former vice president Annette Lu, a staunch supporter of Chen, called him "too stupid, too greedy."
"I kept telling myself that this could not have happened. He has hurt all Taiwanese. My heart is hurting, my heart is broken," she said at a meeting on Friday.
Chen resigned from the DPP Thursday as the party was preparing to expel him. He served as president for two terms, from 2000 to 2004 and from 2004 to 2008.