Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC) general manager Tsai Huei-sheng (蔡輝昇) yesterday denied taking bribes from advertisers and said he would file a defamation lawsuit against Chinese-language Next Magazine for making such allegations in a story.
The story quoted Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Lee Ching-yuan (李慶元) as saying that Tsai accepted more than NT$300,000 (US$9,250) in gifts last year from the agency in charge of MRT ads.
TRTC development office director Liu Wen-chi (劉文麒) accepted a monthly reward of NT$50,000 starting in April last year, Lee alleged, adding that the two were also invited to high-end restaurants and private clubs by the agency.
Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) also vouched for Tsai’s integrity and said an internal investigation launched by the city’s Department of Government Ethics found no evidence of Tsai taking bribes from advertisers.
Ethics department chief Yang Shih-king (楊石金) said the department launched an investigation after receiving a request from Lee last month and found no evidence.
However, Lee yesterday insisted that Tsai accepted bribes from the advertiser and said the TRTC increased ad spots for the agency, profiting the company as much as NT$50 million.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
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XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods