Although bidding for construction of the Taipei World Trade Center Nangang Exhibition Hall is alleged to have involved corruption, there have been no problems with the use of the premises, Huang Hsiao-kuan (黃孝寬), the hall’s director said yesterday.
Huang said that the Taipei World Trade Center Nangang Exhibition Hall has hosted six large-scale international exhibitions since opening on March 13 this year. Many of the participants in these exhibitions had expressed satisfaction with the hall, he said.
However, Huang said that the builder may face fines because of differences of opinion on the hall’s construction completion date between it and the Ministry of the Interior’s Construction and Planning Agency.
Huang also said that although the bidding process for the construction contract may have involved corruption, there had not been any problems with the exhibition hall itself, except for some minor leaks in some pipes.
No major faults in terms of construction quality had been found, he said.
The Nangang Exhibition Hall took more than 10 years to plan and build.
It was built because the increasing number of large-scale international exhibitions had overwhelmed the Taipei World Trade Center in the Xinyi District (信義) of Taipei.
Former minister of the interior Yu Cheng-hsien (余政憲) was detained on Wednesday on charges connected to alleged bribery during the bidding process.
The prosecutor’s office said Yu was suspected of leaking the names of members of a committee responsible for screening the bids for the lucrative construction project.
Yu allegedly made the list available to the company that eventually won the bid during his tenure as minister of the interior between 2002 and 2004, the office said.
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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