Taipei City blamed for contractor's suicide

The Control Yuan will be asked to investigate the circumstances surrounding the suicide of a man contracted by the Taipei City Government to demolish the Chungshan Bridge, a New Party city councilor said yesterday.

Councilor Pan Huai-chung (潘懷宗) on Monday accused the city government of delaying payment to Huang Kuo-hsiung (黃國雄), leaving him heavily in debt. Huang was found hanged under the Chungshan Bridge on Sept. 16.

The case will be submitted to the Control Yuan this week, Pan said.

Pan convened a news conference on Monday, accusing officials at the city's Bureau of Public Works of asking Huang to speed up demolition of the bridge, promising him that "money is not a problem as long as you finish the demolition as soon as possible."

Yet the bureau later did not pay Huang the extra NT$3.3 million it cost him to complete the demolition in April, Pan said.

The bureau also asked Huang to pay about NT$3 million on behalf of the bureau to two public relations companies to hold a concert titled "Goodbye, Chungshan Bridge" on the understanding the costs would be refunded, Pan said.

In March, Huang asked the bureau to allocate the extra money for the work. However, a bureau official said the overspending could not exceed 50 percent of the original budget, which was about NT$4.4 million, Pan said.

Pan said the bureau agreed to give only about NT$1.8 million more to Huang and suggested he would have to wait until the middle of October to get the money.

Huang's wife and son said the city government was a criminal who killed Huang.

"My dad suffered depression caused by the liabilities and apologized to me frequently for leaving me with only debts," Huang's crying son said.

Pan said when Huang began demolishing the bridge last December, he discovered that the blueprints he had been given by the city government did not match the real construction of the bridge, making it more difficult to destroy.

Lo Jyhun-sheng (羅俊昇), director of the Division of Construction Maintenance under the Bureau of Public Works, said the design charts that the bureau gave Huang were offered by the Chung Shing Engineering Consultant Co Ltd (中興工程顧問公司), the company that designed and built the bridge.

Lo said his division would have been willing to reconcile their charts with what Huang had found in the bridge and that he regretted Huang's death.

Chen Wei-jan (陳威仁), director of the Bureau of Public Works, said Huang had won the contract with a pretty low bid and later found it difficult to complete the task within the budget, for which he could not blame to the city government.