The Ministry of Finance and its subordinate, the Directorate General of Customs, both received a brace of official censures yesterday as the Control Yuan dished out six in one day.
The finance ministry was found at fault for failing to effectively repossess illegally-occupied state-owned land as well as its failure to properly allocate gauze masks during the SARS outbreak earlier this year.
Customs officials were also censured for their role in the mask mix-up that led to a shortage of protective equipment for medical workers on the front line of the fight against the contagion.
The second censure handed down to the Directorate General of Customs was linked to a Control Yuan investigation into the illegal export of stolen cars.
"The finance ministry was censured since it failed to oversee the allocation and management of gauze masks conducted by the Directorate General of Customs during the last SARS outbreak," the censure, proposed by Control Yuan members Hsieh Ching-huei (謝慶輝), Huang Wu-tzu (黃武次) and Lin Chu-liang (林鉅鋃), stated.
Hsieh and his colleagues found that customs officials delayed the delivery of up to 20 million masks to hospitals in April and May.
"The Directorate General of Customs' failure to make a timely response to the market deserves a review of its procedures and that of its superior," the censure stated.
The Control Yuan's investigation into the finance ministry's seizure of state-owned government residences, initiated by Lin Chiang-tsai (
"The finance ministry failed to perform its role of coordinating subordinates and other government agencies to execute the retrieval plan. The failure produced limited results and the occupancy problem remains serious," the censure stated.
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