Many public properties have been occupied without due compensation, a situation that has seen little improvement over the years, according to a legislative report released recently.
The report, prepared by the legislature's budget center, noted that the total surface area of public real estate that is currently being illegally occupied amounts to the surface area of nine Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall parks.
The land and residences at issue belong to various state-run enterprises whose annual budget must be approved by the legislature.
The lawmaking body will not review their spending budgets until next spring, as the central government's budget will dominate the current session.
According to the legislative budget center, Taiwan Sugar Corp has tracts of land totaling 1.2 million square meters being illegally occupied.
That accounts for 60 percent of the 2.14 million square meters of public real estate being illegally occupied altogether, the report shows.
Taiwan Power Company and Land Bank of Taiwan rank at second and third, respectively.
The former has yet to take back land properties of 170,000 square meters, while the latter has some 110,000 square meters of land being illegally occupied, the report says.
In addition, Chinese Petroleum Corp tops others in having the biggest number of buildings being illegally occupied.
A total of 275 residences in its possession have yet to be turned over to the gas company, even though their leases have expired, the budget center notes.
Taiwan Sugar Company comes second with 277 of its buildings being illegally occupied, trailed by Taiwan Tobacco and Wine Company, which has 260 buildings being illegally occupied in this way, the legislative report indicates.
The budget center attributes the misuse of the public real estate to inaction on the part of the state-run enterprises.
It notes that in some cases, the court has reaffirmed their ownership of certain properties, but the government-owned companies have been hesitant to evict the occupants.
Bank of Taiwan has some 450 pieces of real estate that are occupied illegally, many of which are located in downtown Taipei and Kaohsiung, according the legislative report.
The report says that some national enterprises fail to honestly report the real estate in their possession and recommends the government heed the problem to avoid waste of public resources.
Being aware of the situation, Premier Yu Shyi-kun earlier instructed the Cabinet's Central Personnel Administration to come up with a plan on how to more effectively manage official residences -- including those legally or illegally occupied or left vacant.
Government statistics show that 87,390 official residences across the nation are illegally occupied.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift