Disregarding requests from the Ministry of Justice, the Industrial Development Bureau (IDB) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs announced it will sell 350-hectares of reclaimed coastal land to Formosa Plastics Group (FPG, 台塑集團), the first time the government would sell public land inside an industrial complex to a private company.
The IDB on Wednesday denied rumors that it favored Formosa and stressed that this is the first case approved by the IDB simply because no private enterprise had filed such an application before. The public land will be sold to FPG in order to save taxpayers' money on the maintenance fee of the land, the IDB said. The agency caused a recent disturbance by selling coastal land to FPG for its Mailiao Harbor in Yunlin County.
But the Ministry of Justice has disagreed with the IDB's decision.
According to Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan (陳定南), provisions in the Statute for Upgrading Industries (促進產業升級條例) allowing the rental and sale of industrial harbors obviously violate the Land Law (土地法) and had been revised on Dec. 31 last year. Industrial harbors currently can only be rented but not sold by private companies.
However, FPG has said it does have the right to purchase the reclaimed coastal land. The company filed its application in 1995 and signed the contract with IDB at the end of 1999, before the statute was revised. "Everything we do is legal," an FPG representative said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day