French Transport Minister Jean-Claude Gayssot has cancelled a visit to Taiwan citing "diary commitments," the ministry said yesterday, denying any link with French cabinet scandals which may involve weapons sales to Taiwan.
Gayssot had been due to arrive this evening to lobby for the sale of a high-speed rail system from the European consortium named Eurotrain.
A report Friday said Gayssot had been scheduled to meet President Lee Teng-hui (
The paper said the trip was canceled shortly after a French-Taiwanese association was cited in a corruption probe that has embarrassed France's ruling Socialists and caused the resignation of finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
"We've been informed Thursday morning that the minister is not coming," said an official based in Taiwan. "But we were not given the reason," he said on condition of anonymity.
Apparently trying to avoid the sensitive issue, Taiwan's foreign ministry spokesman Henry Chen said: "I didn't even know he had planned to come."
Eurotrain, formed by France's Alstom Group and Germany's Siemens Group, is battling the Shinkansen group of Japan for a NT$80 billion contract to supply train carriages and locomotives for Taiwan's high-speed rail system.
According to French news reports, magistrates investigating a scandal-ridden student health-care fund, the MNEF, are trying to determine whether there is a link between it and an association called France-Taiwan, which may have served as a cover to help push for deals involving weapons sales to Taiwan.
Strauss-Kahn stepped down Tuesday over allegations he was paid 603,000 francs in 1997 for legal work he never performed for the MNEF, and that as minister he may have known of forged documents drawn up to hide the transaction.
In 1991, when the association was created, the French oil giant Elf-Aquitaine was pushing for the sale of French frigates to Taiwan in the face of strong opposition from China.
That affair led to a corruption probe against former Socialist foreign minister Roland Dumas and his ex-mistress Christine Deviers-Joncour, who were allegedly involved in the 1991 sale of six frigates.
The probe forced Dumas to step down last March from his post as head of France's Constitutional Council, where he was the fifth-ranking official in the state hierarchy.
The daily Liberation said several people who served as intermediaries to help push for the frigate and Mirage sales were involved with the MNEF.
In 1992, Paris struck a US$3.8 billion deal with Taipei to sell it 60 Mirage 2000-5 jets again following determined opposition from Beijing.
The Mach 2.2-capable Mirage was especially sought by Taiwan because of its superior performance and armament when compared with the Russian Su-27 jets with which China started rearming its poorly equipped air force earlier this decade.
Taiwan took delivery of the last batch of the Mirage fighters in October last year.
The arms sale caused a serious rift between Paris and Beijing, and China ordered the closure of the French consulate in the southern city of Guangzhou. The consulate was officially reopened in 1997.
France and China reached an agreement in 1994 under which France guaranteed to stop arming Taiwan.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
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