District prosecutors led investigators in a search of Sika Taiwan’s offices yesterday and confiscated inventory reports, contracts and other paperwork as part of their investigation into a scandal over the use of defective adhesive in public construction projects.
Sika Taiwan is suspected of failing to inform the Taipei City Government of a product recall in January by the manufacturer’s US branch, Sika USA.
The city government used one of the recalled products, AnchorFix-4, in several construction projects, including the Xinsheng Overpass (新生高架橋), until the Chinese-language Next Magazine contacted city officials earlier this month with questions about the use of the adhesives.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said it did not wait for city government to file the lawsuit, but assigned prosecutor Lin Tsung-chih (林宗志) to lead the investigation to help speed up the process.
Investigators from the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau took part in the raid on the Sika Taiwan’s office in Lujhu (蘆竹) Township, Taoyuan County.
Prosecutors said they were trying to determine whether Sika Taiwan committed offenses against public safety, or engaged in fraud and forgery.
They said a key element in the probe would be determining whether its managers and employees deliberately failed to inform the city of the recall.
They said they would call the company’s managers in for questioning.
The Xinsheng Overpass has been undergoing a NT$1.6 billion (US$48 million) renovation since July last year.
It had been scheduled to reopen at the end of next month.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
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