Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus secretary-general Chang Sho-wen (張碩文) yesterday accused the Council of Agriculture (COA) of asking gangsters to threaten him over a proposed freeze of the council’s budget requests.
Legislators have proposed freezing a NT$2 billion (US$60 million) COA annual budget request intended for subsidies to farmers’ associations or agricultural groups.
KMT Legislator Hsiao Ching-tien (蕭景田) said he had found that the COA could decide whom to give the grant to without having to invite public bids and that COA officials or retirees served as board members of 35 of the organizations that had received grants in the past.
Hsiao then proposed that the COA be required to establish a complete set of screening processes for the grants and oblige the council to report the screening mechanism to the legislature before the budget request would continue to be reviewed.
The Legislative Yuan is reviewing the government’s fiscal budget requests for next year and is scheduled to complete the review by the end of the year.
Chang lambasted the council, saying it should have spoken to him or other lawmakers who proposed the freeze or arranged for special reports during legislative meetings to help lawmakers better understand the council’s requests, rather than applying pressure on legislators through “friends.”
“The council asked gangsters to threaten to withdraw election support [for me] if [I] didn’t withdraw my proposal,” Chang said.
“The council should do what a government branch has to do and persuade legislators that the budget would be spent on taking care of the public,” Chang said.
Hsiao, who also said he had been pressured, criticized the council’s actions as “inappropriate,” saying the council should communicate with lawmakers through “normal channels.”
In response, the chief of the council’s accounting department, Shih Hsin-pin (施欣蘋), said: “After reading press reports [of the alleged threats] we found that at least some parts of the news did not represent the truth … It is impossible that the COA would [employ gangsters to pressure legislators].”
“The reports may have stemmed from misunderstandings the council had with some legislators during the meeting … As such the council will strive to improve communication with the legislature,” Shih said.
There are two ways the COA may grant money to an organization — by commission or by subsidy funding, Shih said. While evaluation for the former is subject to Article 15 of the Government Procurement Law (政府採購法), which states that to avoid conflicts of interest the commissioned parties should not be the purchasers, their spouse, or close relatives, the council only observes “COA regulations” when it comes to subsidies, Shih said.
Asked about Chang’s accusation that the COA was “refereeing its own soccer game” and allocating subsidy funding to organizations whose chairs are current or retired employees of the council, Shih said: “The council grants subsidies to organizations according to need and usage of funds … Decisions on the grants have nothing to do with whether a current or retired employee heads the organization or not.”
However, “in response to the legislature’s request,” the COA will develop a new evaluation process for reviewing subsidy applications that will take into consideration who heads the applying organizations, Shih said, adding that a report would be ready within two months.
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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