With 86 days to go until the Taipei mayoral election, Chiang Wan-an, who is seeking re-election, has again come under attack over his early record practising law in the United States — a development unfavourable to his campaign.

• Former National Assembly member Huang Peng-hsiao has publicly alleged that Chiang Wan-an's legal practice in the United States at the time drew its business mainly from Chinese companies that used falsified financial statements to list in the US.
• Huang further claimed that these cases came his way because Chiang Wan-an's father, Chiang Hsiao-yen, was drumming up business for his son across China.
• Chiang Wan-an built his last campaign around the image of a "Silicon Valley lawyer", but critics point out that it took him three attempts to pass the California bar, putting him behind other graduates of top schools.
• He stayed little more than a year at the well-known Silicon Valley firm WSGR before leaving, later moving to a small firm and then founding his own, whose core business was helping Chinese companies raise funds, carry out reverse mergers and go public in the United States.
• UMC founder Robert Tsao argues that Chiang Wan-an, newly qualified at the time, could not possibly have handled major cases, and that his actual work was mostly running errands and odd jobs.

Outlook: This wave of questions about Chiang Wan-an's professional credentials and his business dealings with China is expected to keep building ahead of the election, becoming a prime line of attack for his opponents.