Another four hospital executives were detained yesterday on suspicion of accepting bribes as a high-profile procurement scandal involving the nation’s public hospitals continued to snowball.
The latest detentions brought the total number of hospital officials who have been taken into custody since March by prosecutors investigating hospital corruption to nine.
The latest detainees include Chung Wei-sheng (鐘威昇), superintendent of the the Department of Health’s Chest Hospital in Greater Tainan, and Tang Kao-chun (唐高駿), superintendent of National Yang-Ming University Hospital in Taipei City.
The other two are Lin Chi-min (林繼敏), director of cardiology at the department’s Keelung Hospital, and Chen Shih-chung (陳識中), -director of cardiology at New Taipei City Hospital.
The detentions followed major raids launched on Thursday by the Taoyuan District Prosecutors’ Office in which 17 suspects and witnesses were summoned for questioning.
With the exception of the four officials, all the others were released after questioning, including Li Nai-shu (李乃樞), superintendent of Lo-Sheng Sanatorium, who was released on NT$100,000 bail.
Thursday’s raids were the third in a series taken since March to probe procurement irregularities at some public hospitals between 2003 and last year, in which executives are alleged to have accepted bribes from medical equipment suppliers in return for favoring these suppliers during the procurement process.
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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