Facing speculation about a Cabinet reshuffle after Saturday's local government elections, Premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) yesterday said he is willing to step down if asked, and that any other adjustments will be carried out with an eye to maintaining social and political stability.
The legislature will go into a three-day recess today to let lawmakers campaign for their party's candidates.
Hsieh said that there are two ways for him to leave his post: if President Chen Shui-bian (
"I will not be reluctant to leave, but so far nobody, including the president, has asked me to leave," Hsieh said.
Hsieh made the remarks on the legislative floor yesterday morning in response to questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Pan Wei-kang (潘維剛) and People First Party (PFP) caucus whip Hwang Yih-jiau (黃義交).
The pair asked whether Hsieh will quit his job after the elections, in light of Vice President Annette Lu's (呂秀蓮) reported comments that there will be a Cabinet reshuffle after the election, regardless of the result.
Meanwhile, Hsieh said he will file a defamation lawsuit against KMT Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) for posting a newspaper advertisement, in which Hsieh appears in a digitally-altered picture with former presidential adviser Chen Che-nan (陳哲男) and former vice chairman of Kaohsiung Rapid Transit Corp (KRTC) Chen Min-hsien (陳敏賢), who were both caught up in the KRTC scandal.
Scandal questions
On the Lafayette kickback scandal, Hsieh yesterday called on fugitive Andrew Wang (
Hsieh made the remark after Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Shen Fa-hui (沈發惠) alleged that Wang's overseas accounts were actually the KMT's accounts. The KMT itself obtained NT$23 billion (US$700 million) in commissions from the frigate deal, Shen said.
Hsieh said that he was stunned to learn of the news and will relay the information to the inquiry commission. He also called on Wang to provide authorities with any information he can about the case.
The DPP caucus yesterday claimed that former president Lee Teng-hui (
DPP Legislator Gao Jyh-peng (高志鵬) said that he has four questions for Ma: Why was there an about-face in the purchase from South Korea to France, why did military authorities reject South Korea's further bids, why did the KMT administration make a compromise with the French on the deal and finally, why did the government allow France to increase the unit price from NT$5.5 billion to NT$13.4 billion within one year.
More `gimmicks'
The KMT dismissed the DPP's criticism as an "election gimmick" aimed at winning Saturday's polls.
Pan said that she would like to ask the president three questions in return. She said that she would like to know why Lieutenant General Chen Kuo-hsiang (
She would also like to know why the president, after being elected, took a different attitude toward the case from that he took as a lawmaker. She also asked the president to share with the public the content of a key tape which allegedly contained important information of the case but that mysteriously disappeared from Chen's house.
PFP Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) yesterday also told the DPP to get a lawyer ready because Hau will soon file a lawsuit.
Lin said that Lee Teng-hui was definitely kept in the loop about the frigate deal, and that the military spent six years assessing eight types of frigate before concluding that the Lafayette-class French ships were the best.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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