A senior Taiwanese financial-crime prosecutor is stepping down after 17 years to become a defense lawyer, a small but telling loss for the island's white-collar enforcement bench.

• Yeh Yao-chun, chief prosecutor at the Shilin District Prosecutors Office, ends his judicial career and starts practicing law as an attorney focused on financial crime.
• His signature case was the "Yuan Man No. 1" real-estate trust fund, where a property firm faked leases to make a mostly empty office building look fully rented before the fund was sold to investors.
• That case was Taiwan's first prosecution for a false prospectus under its real-estate securitization law, and it went ahead even after regulators had approved the listing.
• He also declined to charge in a biotech share-swap case, ruling that a bad-looking deal was not by itself proof of criminal intent — a rare line-drawing call in financial cases.
• His reason for leaving: as a prosecutor he had to keep his distance from the people involved, and he wanted to work closer to them.

Outlook: Expect him to turn up on the defense side of exactly the securities, corporate-compliance, and crypto-regulation cases he used to build.