People First Party (PFP) legislator-at-large and former legislative speaker Liu Sung-fan (
Liu sent a letter to the PFP caucus yesterday to say that he had officially informed Soong of his decision to withdraw his party membership. He said that he was worried his case would affect the party's campaign for the legislative elections, so he decided to withdraw from the PFP.
FILE PHOTO: LIBERTY TIMES
Liu was on Tuesday sentenced by the Taiwan High Court's Taichung Branch to four years in jail for corruption. The court said that Liu, as the chairman of the board at the Taichung Business Bank, received NT$150 million in kickbacks from Tseng Cheng-jen (曾正仁), president of the Kuangsan Enterprise Group.
Liu's office yesterday said that he was still in New York, but would return to Taiwan. The office declined to give a specific date for his return.
PFP caucus whip Liu Wen-hsiung (
The PFP caucus also announced that Liu's seat would be filled by Namchow Group chairman Alfred Chen (陳飛龍) as Chen was the next candidate on the PFP's legislator-at-large list. The caucus denied that the party would skip Chen and send Soong, the candidate next on the list after Chen, into the legislature.
The replacement issue settled down as Chen and Soong met yesterday at noon and Chen's willingness to fill the seat was confirmed.
"I am happy and have no regret about going to the Legislative Yuan, to represent and speak for the business circle in the legislature," Chen said in a telephone interview yesterday afternoon.
Chen is scheduled to visit PFP headquarters and the caucus today to exchange opinions about his duties in this session.
"The party is sending Chen to the legislature because the order of legislators-at-large on the list was already determined three years ago, and we will abide by the law to fill the seat according to this order of succession," Liu Wen-hsiung said.
"This is also about integrity and honesty -- we promised a place on the list to Chen three years ago, and we are keeping our promise," he said.
Meanwhile, Liu Wen-hsiung said that all necessary paperwork would be finished on time to allow Chen to take the oath before Tuesday, so he could take part in the showdown about the reconsideration request for the controversial statute authorizing the formation of an investigative committee probing the March 19 shooting incident.
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