President Chen Shui-bian (
A press release from the Presidential Office's public affairs department yesterday said that the two resignations were reviewed seriously.
"The Presidential Office would like to adopt higher standards in evaluating the case, hoping that investigators would probe into it and get clues sooner," the statement said.
According to the department, the president fully backs the prosecutors investigating the case and believes that the rank of those being investigated should not be a factor in any probe.
What role, if any, either Chen Che-nan or Chen Min-hsien played in the hiring of Thai workers for the Kaohsiung system has been the center of a scandal over the project in the wake of a riot by some of the Thai laborers in late August.
Investigators are trying to trace the links between the two men and the decision to hire Thai workers to help build the MRT system.
The pan-blue camp was quick to criticize the president's decision to accept the resignations.
The People First Party (PFP) caucus said Chen Che-nan's resignation was a bid to protect a higher-ranking official and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus asked that he be barred from leaving the country.
KMT caucus whip Pan Wei-kang (
PFP Legislator Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) said the resignations must not be seen as the end of the matter because the truth is not yet known.
PFP Legislator Liu Wen-hsiung (劉文雄) questioned President Chen's rejection of Chen Che-nan's plan to visit Japan last month and asked the Presidential Office to explain why a presidential adviser needed the president's approval to go overseas.
Presidential Office Deputy Secretary-General Ma Yung-cheng (馬永成) got into a heated debate with KMT Legislator Kuo Su-chun (郭素春) over the resignations and Chen Che-nan's travel plans during a meeting of the legislature's Organic Laws and Statutes Committee.
When Chen Che-nan asked for leave last month to visit the World Expo in Aichi his request was rejected by the Presidential Office on the grounds that he needed to stay in the country to help with the prosecutors' investigation.
Ma told Kuo that the president thought that it wasn't the right time for Chen Che-nan to be making a foreign trip.
Ma rejected Kuo's assertion that the Presidential Office had turned a blind eye to allegations of abuse that arose in the wake of the riot.
Ma said that President Chen had told him that he would be extremely distraught if Thai workers hired to build Kaohsiung's subway system were found to have been exploited.
Meanwhile, the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors Office said Chen Che-nan has not been barred from leaving the country.
Chung Chung-hsiao (鍾忠孝), spokesman for the prosecutors office, said yesterday that prosecutors have reviewed records of calls made by Chen Che-nan, Chen Min-hsien and Wang Tsai-pi (王彩碧), a woman working for a labor brokerage with connections in Thailand.
"We have collected their [entry and exit] records from the immigration office and phone records of calls they made in July 2002, when all three were in Thailand," Chang said.
According to Chang, Wang made more than 20 calls to Chen Che-nan during that July trip and he called her at least four times.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS