Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) Director-General Frank Fan (范植谷) has received two demerits following a spate of bribery allegations involving railway officials, Minister of Transportation and Communications Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) told the legislature yesterday, adding that the ministry would complete its full investigation into the corruption cases within three months.
Late last month, six railway officials, including deputy director-general Chung Chao-hsiung (鍾朝雄), were detained for allegedly accepting bribes and sexual favors from a contractor bidding for the agency’s “Around-the-Nation Safety Enhancement Project.”
Last week the Investigation Bureau summoned another TRA deputy director-general, Huang Min-jen (黃民仁), along with 18 other officials and businesspeople, for questioning about suspected bribes in another bid to rebuild a section of a bridge over the Taimali River (太麻里溪) on the South Link Line. Huang was released on NT$1 million (US$34,000) bail on Friday.
Lawmakers on the Transportation Committee held a meeting yesterday to discuss the scandal and measures to prevent graft and corruption in public construction bids.
Fan repeatedly apologized for the scandal that has engulfed the railway agency and said he would not hesitate to step down.
“Corruption scandals have kept on happening. Someone should take responsibility,” Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Yeh Yi-jin (葉宜津) said.
Yeh said that officials responsible for unreasonably low-priced bids, construction delays, design alterations or budget overruns should be given a low performance rating.
DPP Legislator Lee Kun-tse (李昆澤) said Fan should resign and take responsibility for the corruption scandal, a suggestion that DPP Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) seconded.
Mao said Fan had already been given two demerits and that the “ministry’s next goal is to eliminate corruption.”
The ministry also announced yesterday morning that Chung and the officials who had been taken into custody had all been given a major demerit and were suspended from their posts.
In response to Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lee Hung-chun’s (李鴻鈞) suggestion of a full-scale investigation into all problematic construction bids in the past five years and question on how long it would take the ministry to do so, Mao said: “We can complete it in three months and provide the information to the committee in the next legislative session.”
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching