Less than two years after winning a landmark 630 million euro (US$875 million) lawsuit against a French defense contractor over the scandal-plagued sale of Lafayette-class frigates to Taiwan in the 1990s, an arbitration court last week shot down Taipei’s hopes for a second win in a related case, citing a lack of evidence.
In its follow-up claim, Taipei had filed claims of 45.5 million euros, including interests and prosecution fees, against DCNS, the maker of the frigates, over a 1996 spares supply contract for the six multi-role stealth frigates.
A Basic Ordering Agreement signed on May 20, 1996, stipulated that Taiwan would be entitled to a 15 percent reduction if French agents were caught paying commissions to middlemen.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
However, an arbitration tribunal under the International Chamber of Commerce cut the compensation to 3 million euros, citing a lack of evidence to support Taiwan’s full claims against DCNS, then a state-owned entity known as Direction de Constructions Navales, Defense News reported.
The Ministry of National Defense had set aside NT$75 million (US$2.6 million) in this year’s defense budget to fund the new litigation, which it filed on Oct. 12 last year.
The ruling follows a similar one handed down on June 9 last year, in which Thales, a company then known as Thomson-CSF, which supplied the electronics on the frigates, and the French government were ordered to pay Taiwan 170 million euros and 460 million euros respectively for illegal kickbacks and commissions in the initial US$2.8 billion Bravo deal signed in 1991.
Aside from hampering access to critical technologies to Taiwan, the Lafayette scandal also claimed the life of Yin Ching-feng (尹清楓), a naval captain who is believed to have been murdered in December 1993 as he was about to blow the whistle on colleagues who were receiving kickbacks in the deal.
Thomson-CSF’s agent in Taiwan, Andrew Wang (汪傳浦), fled the country soon after Yin’s body was found floating near Suao (蘇澳).
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS