Senior public servants are required to declare gifts worth more than NT$200,000 under the government regulations relating to ethics, a Control Yuan official said yesterday.
Control Yuan Secretary-General Tu Shan-liang (杜善良) said those who are obliged to report their assets under the Public Functionary Assets Disclosure Law must report all family possessions in their declaration forms to be submitted to the Control Yuan.
At the moment, Tu said, the disclosed assets are mostly land, real estate, houses, vehicles, jewelry and financial assets. Few public officials, however, have reported paintings and works of art in the assets declaration because of difficulties in defining the value of the art pieces, he added.
Tu was speaking during a meeting of the Legislative Yuan's Judiciary Committee, where he was questioned about the assets declaration and related affairs.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chiu Chuei-chen (邱垂貞) asked Tu whether the recipient would be punished if he did not record a gift on the wealth-declaration form because he did not know the value of the gift.
Tu said in this kind of case -- if the recipient did not declare the gift he received because he did not know whether the gift was valued over NT$200,000 -- the Control Yuan would give more lenient considerations.
In asking the question, Chiu referred to news reports that Tainan Mayor Hsu Tien-tsai (許添財) had allegedly received a diamond ball-point pen from a Tainan resident as a gift upon his being elected mayor two years ago, but Hsu did not list the pen on his wealth-declaration form to the Control Yuan. The pen was reportedly worth NT$1 million.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,