Twenty-five elementary schools in Taipei City could be involved in alleged school lunch bribery cases, a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City councilor said yesterday, urging Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) to look into the situation.
Amid a recent investigation into at least 10 elementary school principals from New Taipei City (新北市) over allegations they accepted kickbacks from school lunch vendors, KMT Taipei City Councilor Wang Hao (王浩) said two of the suspected vendors may have provided lunches to 12 elementary schools for the past nine years. This is on top of another 13 elementary schools that have been using the same school lunch vendors for the past six years.
“It is unusual for the same school lunch vendors to win public bids for lunches for six or nine consecutive years. The city government should address the issue immediately and see if any school principals took kickbacks from the vendors,” he said during a question-and-answer session at the Taipei City Council.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
News of the alleged bribery involving school lunches emerged last month in New Taipei City after more than 10 elementary school principals were suspected of taking kickbacks from lunch vendors.
A preliminary investigation by the Banciao District Prosecutors’ Office showed that the lunch vendors might have bribed the school principals to receive a better evaluation, helping their bids to supply school lunches.
The Ministry of Justice launched a nationwide inspection of bids for school lunch contracts and found that of more than 1,500 junior-high and elementary schools that offered lunches, about 300 could be involved in kickback scandals.
Hau yesterday expressed concerns about schools being involved in corruption and said the city government would look into the situation.
The city government also said it welcomed any information the public could give on such cases and that it would offer a reward of NT$2 million (US$60,000) for confirmed cases.
“The Department of Government Ethics will look into the situation, especially schools that have dealt with the problematic vendors, and we will not tolerate any illegal acts like this in schools,” he said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift