Former director-general of the Presidential Office’s accounting department Fon Shui-lin (馮瑞麟) yesterday testified that some of the signed approvals on reimbursement slips for the presidential “state affairs fund” had not been personally approved by presidential aides.
Presiding Judge Tsai Shou-hsun (蔡守訓) scheduled a hearing yesterday to question Fon about the reimbursement process used to allocate the presidential “state affairs fund,” a government fund earmarked for official purposes to be used at the president’s discretion.
Former Presidential Office director Lin Teh-hsun (林德訓) and former Presidential Office deputy secretary-general Ma Yung-cheng (馬永成) are accused of helping former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) embezzle money from the fund while he was in office.
Fon said special circumstances had made it difficult for the accounting department to use “normal procedures” to approve and reimburse expenses from the fund.
When Richard Lee (李深琛), the defense attorney for Ma and Lin, showed Fon reimbursement slips bearing former presidential aides’ seals, Fon said that although it was “regrettable,” the Presidential Office’s cashiers often used the aides’ seals to approve expenses to speed up the reimbursement process.
Fon said that although normal accounting procedure required presidential aides to examine reimbursement slips and approve them by stamping them with their official seal, cashiers often took the seals and stamped documents themselves for the sake of convenience or to avoid bothering their superiors with petty details.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
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