The financial crisis in the US has cost the civil servant retirement fund more than NT$300 million (US$9.3 million), Minister of Civil Service Chang Che-chen (張哲琛) said yesterday.
Chang said the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers cost the fund more than NT$38 million. Another NT$276.5 million was lost after the takeover of investment bank AIG and an additional NT$54 million in the subprime credit crunch, he said
While the government has activated the National Stabilization Fund to support the stock market, Chang said the money did not come from the civil servant retirement fund.
Chang made the remarks at the legislature’s Judiciary, Organic Laws and Statutes Committee yesterday.
He said that since the civil servant retirement fund was established in 1995, NT$495 billion had been paid into it as of last month against total expenses of about NT$162 billion.
Chang said the fund receives about NT$4.6 billion each month, or NT$53 billion a year. Annual expenses are about NT$24 billion.
Aside from bank deposits, Chang said funds had been channeled into local and international investments.
From July 1, 1995 to last month, the net profit of the fund’s investment was NT$55.8 billion. This year, however, the fund had lost NT$26.7 billion as of last month.
While Chang’s predecessor, Chu Wu-hsien (朱武獻), was criticized for being personally involved in the fund’s investment in the stock market, Chang yesterday said he would spend 70 percent of his working day dealing with the ministry’s affairs and 30 percent attending to the fund’s investment.
He also promised to stop using ineffective investment companies.
During Chu’s tenure, he irked the legislature by proposing reform of the 18 percent preferential interest rate on the savings of teachers, civil servants and soldiers.
Chu is under investigation by the Control Yuan and prosecutors after media allegations that his management had led to massive losses for the Civil Servants Pension Fund.
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:
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
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