The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday banned Far Glory Life Insurance Co (遠雄人壽) from making real-estate investments for six months over violations of real-estate investment and telemarketing rules. The penalty also includes a NT$5.1 million (US$170,700) fine.
“The investment ban will stay if Far Glory Life fails to come up with plans to avoid repeats of violations within six months,” FSC Vice Chairman Wu Tang-chieh (吳當傑) told a media briefing.
Farglory Life, a subsidiary of Farglory Group (遠雄企業團), which also owns Farglory Land Development Co (遠雄建設), used employees as dummy buyers to secure five plots of land worth NT$1.1 billion in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖) and New Taipei City’s (新北市) Tucheng District (土城) between 2009 and 2010, the commission said
It was the second time Farglory Life has been caught violating real-estate investment rules.
In April last year, the insurer was banned from real-estate investments for a year because of similar violations linked to the acquisition of two plots of land in Sinjhuang (新莊), New Taipei City, in 2008.
The purchase of the two plots in Sinjhuang — worth a total of NT$2.5 billion — involved the use of dummy accounts by a mother and son, and incurred a fine of NT$11.7 million for Fargloary Life, the most severe given to a financial institution, Insurance Bureau Deputy Director-General Joanne Tseng (曾玉瓊) said.
The FSC also imposed a NT$3 million fine on Bank SinoPac (永豐銀行) over loose internal control and asked it to dismiss the offending employee.
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],”
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
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