A Taipei City internal investigation has discovered nine employees in the Department of Environmental Protection allegedly involved in corruption, and the case has been handed to the Investigation Bureau for further investigation, the Taipei City Government said yesterday.
Yang Shih-jin (楊石金), director of Taipei City’s Department of Government Ethics, said the department found evidence that nine inspectors in the Environmental Protection Department’s cleaning team had collected money to allow a private cleaning company to use illegal garbage bags and failed to give out fines for illegal garbage dumping.
Their job description states that Environmental Protection Department inspectors should patrol the city and hand out fines of NT$1,200 to individuals or companies that fail to use city government-approved garbage bags.
Yang said the nine inspectors had been colluding with the company to collect money in exchange for turning a blind eye to its illegal behavior since 2007. However, the government did not say how much money the nine employees had collected.
The city government started the investigation in August after receiving a tip.
Prosecutors from the Shilin District Court visited the city government yesterday and began investigating the cleaning teams. Yang said the city government would cooperate with prosecutors.
Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) said yesterday that the city government initiated the internal investigation into the corruption case, and would cooperate fully with prosecutors during the investigation.
“Integrity is the basic requirement of all civil servants,” he said yesterday at Taipei City Hall.
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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