France may have to pay Taiwan US$600 million (476 million euros) in fines because of illegal commissions that massively inflated the price of warships sold to Taipei in 1991, Le Figaro reported yesterday, citing a public prosecutor's office report to Justice Minister Dominique Perben.
The Taiwan government filed a lawsuit in November claiming illicit commission payments breached the terms of the frigate construction contract awarded to Thomson-CSF (now Thales SA) the newspaper reported.
Taipei paid more than FF16 billion (2.44 billion euros) for the six Lafayette class frigates, and judicial investigations have since revealed that around a third of that was spent on a complex lobbying operation to secure the deal run by Thomson.
The report drawn up by the Paris prosecutor's office and handed over to the Ministry of Justice on Jan. 15 warned that France is financially liable because of a clause in the contract that stipulated that if commissions were found to have been paid the amount should be deducted from the sale price.
The public prosecutor's report said France may be liable because it acted as guarantor for the frigate contract, Le Figaro said.
Magistrates Renaud van Ruymbeke and Dominique de Talance, who advised the public prosecutor, are about to make their fourth application to successive governments for the lifting of the official secrets act so they might investigate the illicit commissions paid to secure the contract, the paper said.
Vice Minister Hsieh Wen-ting (謝文定) yesterday declined to comment on the report, but only said he needed some time to follow the whole situation.
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