Government officials may have to reimburse lost state funds if they are found to have been negligent in handling their duties, the head of the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
DGBAS Director-General Hsu Chang-yao (許璋瑤) made the remarks in response to questions on whether former minister of foreign affairs James Huang (黃志芳) and former vice premier Chiou I-jen (邱義仁) would have to take responsibility for US$30 million in government funds that went missing after being used in an initiative the two men led in 2006 to establish diplomatic relations with Papua New Guinea.
The money was remitted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in September 2006 to an account in Singapore jointly held by two middlemen brokering the deal.
Hsu said that if Chiou and Huang were found to be negligent, they would have to reimburse the US$30 million to the government in compliance with the Audit Law.
The whereabouts of the funds remain unknown. Chiou and Huang contend that the money was embezzled by the middlemen — Ching Chi-ju (金紀玖) and Wu Shih-tsai (吳思材) — who were commissioned to help set up ties with Papua New Guinea.
Ching, who has a US passport, is believed to be hiding in California. Wu, a Singaporean who held Republic of China citizenship until 2006, is being held incommunicado in Taipei.
The case was brought to light by Huang at a news conference in Taipei on May 1 following a report on the case by a Singapore-based newspaper a day earlier.
Huang said that the middlemen were introduced to him in 2006 by Chiou, then the secretary-general of the National Security Council, to help facilitate negotiations with Papua New Guinea.
Chiou has been banned by prosecutors from leaving the country since early last week. Chiou, Huang and then deputy minister of national defense Ko Cheng-heng (柯承亨) resigned from their government posts on May 6.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which had earlier described the Papua New Guinea fund scandal as a botched diplomatic deal, yesterday urged the public to stop attacking secret diplomacy and defended the innocence of the three key government players.
DPP Secretary-General Lee Ying-yuan (李應元) told reporters after the party’s Central Standing Committee that the party had set up a task force to investigate the controversy and had interviewed Chiou and Huang, but not Ko, who is mourning the death of his father.
The task force yesterday briefed the committee on the first-stage investigation of the scandal. The report concluded that Chiou, Huang and Ko were innocent and they were only trying to secure one more diplomatic ally for the country.
Lee said that progress was made during the process, but the party regretted that the money had disappeared when Huang asked the two intermediaries, Ching and Wu, to return it.
The party will leave it to the judiciary to recover the money and appropriate blame, Lee said.
Lee dismissed allegations that Huang had said Chiou should be mainly held responsible for the incident.
He said “there was no such thing” and that Chiou, Huang and Ko trusted each other.
Expressing regret and apologizing for the failed attempt to forge an ally for Taiwan, Lee said the DPP would correct any wrongs if it had made mistakes, but he hoped the public would refrain from unnecessarily attacking the party.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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