Yunlin County councilors on Friday accused the county government of taking money from accident-prone Formosa Plastics Group (FPG).
Councilor Lee Chien-chih (李建志) blasted Yunlin County Commissioner Su Chih-fen (蘇治芬) for accepting NT$1 billion (US$34.6 million) from FPG last month.
“Taking the money is a humiliating act for the people of Yunlin, especially now when the public is focusing on workplace safety at FPG plants after seven fires at the group’s petrochemical complex in one year,” said another councilor, Lin Shen (林深).
Saying the county government was being “duplicitous” for denouncing the group over the fires on one hand and taking its money on the other, Lin said he doubted the county could remain impartial on safety issues after accepting such a huge sum from FPG.
In response, Su defended her actions by saying that the payments were a matter of regular compensation and they had already been allocated to specific purposes.
The county government would not be be soft on safety issues and the allocations of all funds would be transparent, Su said.
The county had received more than NT$2.6 billion in donations from FPG since 2006, county officials said, adding that the money received last month had nothing to do with the fires and would be used to hold agricultural fairs, build a puppetry cultural center and an international assembly hall.
FPG said that the payments were standard compensation to the county where its petrochemical complex is located. The group denied accusations that it used the payment to seek leniency in county oversight of safety at the complex, and said it would continue to work to improve safety at the complex.
The fires led the Executive Yuan to order a shutdown of all FPG plants that have suffered fires at the group’s Mailiao complex. The company has also been forced to suspend operations at the remaining production facilities in the complex for safety inspections.
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
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