The controversy over Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) special allowance fund has triggered a cycle of law suits filed by different political parties.
Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) yesterday responded to this by saying that these lawsuits were counterproductive.
"This issue concerns a lot of people and I am quite sure that a case like this will definitely increase prosecutors' work load, which is already full," Su said. "[These suits are] actually killing and destroying each other. It is not worth it at all."
On Thursday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Tsai Chin-lung (蔡錦隆) filed a lawsuit against Judicial Yuan President Weng Yueh-sheng (翁岳生) with the Taiwan High Court Prosecutors' Office Black Gold Investigation Center, accusing him of embezzling funds from his discretionary allowance fund.
On the same day, a group of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers filed corruption charges with the Taipei District Prosecutors' Office against 26 incumbent and former heads of the five branches of government as well as incumbent and former vice presidents and premiers.
The legislators said that filing lawsuits against so many officials was solely aimed at underscoring the unreasonable nature of the design and implementation of the discretionary allowance funds.
Su said yesterday that the logical conclusion of pursuing a single case concerning the discretionary allowance fund is to investigate all 6,500 government officials and their staff members.
"At least more than 10,000 will be investigated or indicted in the end. Everybody is involved," Su said.
Regarding his own special allowance fund, Su said he trusts his staff members and believes that they have taken care of this issue carefully and legally.
"In addition to myself, I believe that all my fellow Cabinet members would be too busy to take care of small things like this. I believe that what they have done to handle the money was merely follow what has been done for the past few decades," he said.
Su said it would take time and effort to fix the problems inherent in the special allowance system.
He also urged the public not to scrutinize an already old system using today's standards. Old systems can be changed whenever necessary, he said.
"We do not need to argue over such a thing. It is just not worth it. We need to face the problems together and fix them," Su added. "If we can do this, we will make our country a better one tomorrow."
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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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching