Taiwan never promised to give a US$71 million financial package to Paraguay, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday after the Paraguayan Senate reportedly approved the offer on Wednesday.
“The figure of US$71 million is the amount that Asuncion originally requested from Beijing [in exchange for it switching relations]. Paraguay made the same request to Taiwan after China rejected the deal,” ministry spokesman Henry Chen (陳銘政) said.
Chen said the Republic of China is a democratic country and the government would not earmark any foreign aid to any country without a clear proposal or a plan of action from that nation.
“The country must submit a plan of action, detailing how they plan to use the money and on what projects. The legislature would then review the proposal to ascertain if the projects would truly benefit the public. So far Paraguay has not submitted such a plan,” Chen said, stressing that Taiwan had never agreed on any conditions by which it would give Paraguay the multimillion dollar aid package.
Nobody at the Paraguayan embassy in Taiwan was available for comment yesterday.
Weber Shih (施文斌), head of the ministry’s Department of Economic and Trade Affairs and Chen Lien-gene (陳連軍), the secretary-general of the International Cooperation Development Fund, the two organizations that deal with Taiwan’s foreign aid projects, both said yesterday they had not heard of such an offer.
The Central News Agency (CNA), quoting the La Nacion daily in Asuncion, reported on Wednesday that the Paraguayan Senate had originally rejected Taiwan’s financial offer in its last session.
The resolution was then resubmitted to the Senate this month at the behest of the finance ministry, the report said.
The resolution would then be sent to parliament for a final review, CNA quoted the paper as saying, adding that the report pointed out that some opposition lawmakers were concerned about accepting the sum because such a gesture would contradict Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo’s non-supportive position on Taiwan’s UN bid this year.
On several occasions in the past, Lugo has threatened to end relations with Taiwan and forge official ties with Beijing during his presidency.
Miguel Carrizosa, a senator from the Party of the Best Fatherland, was quoted as saying that the money could be part of the national budget to be allocated under the strictest supervision.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday that it was conducting a comprehensive review and compiling a white paper on its foreign aid projects in an attempt to shake off its reputation of employing “dollar diplomacy” to curry favor with other nations.
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