Hundreds of people — including film director Leon Dai (戴立忍) — have challenged Le Young Construction (樂揚建設) to sue them after the company filed a slander lawsuit against a Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) student.
The student, Huang Hui-yu (黃慧瑜), posted a comment critical of the firm’s actions surrounding an urban renewal project on her Facebook page.
“To Le Young Construction, the following remark, in quotation marks, is exactly the same as the comment that TNUA student Huang Hui-yu wrote on her Facebook page,” Tai said on his own Facebook page.
Photo: Huang Chi-hao, Taipei Times
“I’ve heard that your respected company has filed a slander lawsuit against Huang for the remark. If this is so, please also file a slander lawsuit against me, thank you,” he wrote.
Huang, a graduate student at the TNUA and a member of the Taiwan Alliance for Victims of Urban Renewal, criticized several construction firms that have initiated urban renewal projects — including Le Young — as “notorious” and hinted they have connections to the mafia.
Le Young Construction, which labels itself as “the No. 1 brand in urban renewal,” is the initiator of the urban renewal project in Taipei City’s Shilin District (士林), which involves demolishing a block of decades-old apartments to make way for a 15-story high-rise luxury housing complex.
Although most of the property owners on the block agreed to the project, a family surnamed Wang (王) that owned two homes there refused to take part and wanted to keep their homes.
However, because the Wangs did not express their objections in writing in the project’s initial phase and because more than 75 percent of the property owners on the block agreed to the project, the Wangs’ homes were forcefully demolished on March 28 by a demolition squad sent by the city government. The demolition squad was escorted by more than 1,000 police officers.
According to the Urban Renewal Act (都市更新條例), the initiator of an urban renewal project may ask the city government to demolish the properties of those who do not wish to take part in the project, as long as three quarters of property owners on the site agree to the project.
On March 28, about 400 people — many of them college students — rallied outside the Wangs’ properties trying to stop the demolition. They were all removed by force and arrested after physical clashes with the police.
Later on, protesters broke down the construction fence and returned to the site where the Wangs’ homes once stood, and continued to protest.
Le Young last week filed lawsuits against Wang Kuang-shu (王廣樹), head of the Wang family, for breaking the fence and against Huang over her criticism of the company.
Immediately after Tai’s Facebook post, supporters of the Wangs launched an activity on Facebook to post the same statement as Huang and Tai, challenging Le Young to sue them as well.
“I can’t do anything with my friends in person to show support for the Wangs since I’m not in Taipei, but it’s a way of expressing my support if I could also be sued,” Benla Kuang (管中祥), an associate professor at National Chungcheng University’s Department of Communications, said on his Facebook page.
Besides posting the statement to invite a lawsuit, Mickey Lin (林彥瑜), a junior student at National Taiwan University’s Department of Politics, said she would like to launch a fundraising drive to hire an attorney for Huang.
“If they [Le Young] crush the students in this battle, there would be less students willing to stand up for injustices in society and more parents would try to stop their children from taking part in public issues,” Lin said on Facebook.
“Students are penniless and powerless, but we have a conscience and passion that could touch many people,” she said.
CREDIT-GRABBER: China said its coast guard rescued the crew of a fishing vessel that caught fire, who were actually rescued by a nearby Taiwanese boat and the CGA Maritime search and rescue operations do not have borders, and China should not use a shipwreck to infringe upon Taiwanese sovereignty, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said yesterday. The coast guard made the statement in response to the China Coast Guard (CCG) saying it saved a Taiwanese fishing boat. The Chuan Yu No. 6 (全漁6號), a fishing vessel registered in Keelung, on Thursday caught fire and sank in waters northeast of Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台). The vessel left Keelung’s Badouzih Fishing Harbor (八斗子漁港) at 3:35pm on Sunday last week, with seven people on board — a 62-year-old Taiwanese captain surnamed Chang (張) and six
RISKY BUSINESS: The ‘incentives’ include initiatives that get suspended for no reason, creating uncertainty and resulting in considerable losses for Taiwanese, the MAC said China’s “incentives” failed to sway sentiment in Taiwan, as willingness to work in China hit a record low of 1.6 percent, a Ministry of Labor survey showed. The Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) also reported that the number of Taiwanese workers in China has nearly halved from a peak of 430,000 in 2012 to an estimated 231,000 in 2024. That marked a new low in the proportion of Taiwanese going abroad to work. The ministry’s annual survey on “Labor Life and Employment Status” includes questions respondents’ willingness to seek employment overseas. Willingness to work in China has steadily declined from
The Legislative Yuan’s Finance Committee yesterday approved proposed amendments to the Amusement Tax Act (娛樂稅法) that would abolish taxes on films, cultural activities and competitive sporting events, retaining the fee only for dance halls and golf courses. The proposed changes would set the maximum tax rate for dance halls and golf courses at 50 and 20 percent respectively, with local governments authorized to suspend the levies. Article 2 of the act says that “amusement tax shall be levied on tickets sold or fees charged by amusement places, facilities or activities” in six categories: “Cinema; professional singing, story-telling, dancing, circus, magic show, acrobatics
INFLATION UP? The IMF said CPI would increase to 1.5 percent this year, while the DGBAS projected it would rise to 1.68 percent, with GDP per capita of US$44,181 The IMF projected Taiwan’s real GDP would grow 5.2 percent this year, up from its 2.1 percent outlook in January, despite fears of global economic disruptions sparked by the US-Iran conflict. Taiwan’s consumer price index (CPI) is projected to increase to 1.5 percent, while unemployment would be 3.4 percent, roughly in line with estimates for Asia as a whole, the international body wrote in its Global Economic Outlook Report published in the US on Monday. The figures are comparatively better than the IMF outlook for the rest of the world, which pegged real GDP growth at 3.1 percent, down from 3.3 percent
RSS