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Gang seizes control over Taiwanese hotel in China

"We regret the occupation of the Taiwan Hotel."

You Ying-lung, secretary-general of the Straits Exchange Foundation

A Taiwanese-owned hotel in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, China, was forcibly taken over by a gang of people organized by a Chinese shareholder who is also a Chinese Communist Party representative in the city council, a Taiwanese government official said.

The Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), a quasi-official intermediary body authorized to deal with investment disputes in China in the absence of official contacts between the governments of both sides, made the claim in a press release late last night.

The release said the owner of the Taiwan Hotel, Weng Chun-hsien (翁俊賢), told the foundation that Xu Jie-ming (須建明), one of the hotel's shareholders and also vice chairman of the council of Kunshan City, had come into the hotel followed by about 20 people last Friday.

While Xu said he wanted to talk about transferring shares, the group took the hotel's corporate and financial seals, beat up the head of the hotel and expelled both the general manager and the financial controller, Weng was quoted as saying in the SEF release.

"We regret the occupation of the Taiwan Hotel, which follows another commercial dispute involving the Chinese operations of Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Department Store," SEF Secretary-General You Ying-lung (游盈隆) said last night.

You was referring to an incident in which Steve Wu (吳昕達), a general manager of Shin Kong's joint-venture department store in Beijing, was prevented by Chinese authorities from returning to Taiwan for seven days while they investigated a kickbacks probe.

You called on China to handle the case carefully to safeguard the interests of Taiwanese businesses and to take the consequences of these cases seriously.
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