The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has disinvited Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) from its 19th national congress later this month, sources within the party said yesterday.
The congress will be held at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall on Sept. 29, during which KMT members will tackle issues of party policy, as well as attend the swearing in of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) as KMT chairman.
The sources said the party leadership had decided that Wang, who would have attended the congress as chairman of the party’s Central Evaluation and Discipline Committee, would not be present due to the recent controversy over his alleged undue lobbying.
Wang stands accused by the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office Special Investigations Division (SID) of attempting to take legal pressure off Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) by lobbying High Prosecutors’ Office prosecutor Lin Shiow-tao (林秀濤) to not appeal Ker’s not-guilty verdict in a breach of trust case.
The SID says that Wang allegedly enlisted the help of former minister of justice Tseng Yung-fu (曾勇夫) and High Prosecutors’ Office Head Prosecutor Chen Shou-huang (陳守煌) to carry out the illegal lobbying.
The case led the KMT to revoke the legislative speaker’s membership, which in turn caused him to petition the Taiwan High Court to retain his privileges as a party member.
The court approved Wang’s appeal on Friday after stipulating that he pay NT$9.38 million (US$314,300) as a guarantee to the party, but it denied his request to obtain a restraining order to stop the Legislative Yuan from revoking his status as a legislator.
Wang dropped the latter petition on Saturday.
Although the court ruled that the legislative speaker would, for the moment, retain his party membership, the KMT’s Central Standing Committee’s still determined that Wang should not go to the congress, the sources said.
The Central Standing Committee’s view was that the court’s decision did not make Wang a party representative, nor did it mean that he would continue to be the chairman of the disciplinary committee, they added.
South Korean K-pop girl group Blackpink are to make Kaohsiung the first stop on their Asia tour when they perform at Kaohsiung National Stadium on Oct. 18 and 19, the event organizer said yesterday. The upcoming performances will also make Blackpink the first girl group ever to perform twice at the stadium. It will be the group’s third visit to Taiwan to stage a concert. The last time Blackpink held a concert in the city was in March 2023. Their first concert in Taiwan was on March 3, 2019, at NTSU Arena (Linkou Arena). The group’s 2022-2023 “Born Pink” tour set a
CPBL players, cheerleaders and officials pose at a news conference in Taipei yesterday announcing the upcoming All-Star Game. This year’s CPBL All-Star Weekend is to be held at the Taipei Dome on July 19 and 20.
The Taiwan High Court yesterday upheld a lower court’s decision that ruled in favor of former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) regarding the legitimacy of her doctoral degree. The issue surrounding Tsai’s academic credentials was raised by former political talk show host Dennis Peng (彭文正) in a Facebook post in June 2019, when Tsai was seeking re-election. Peng has repeatedly accused Tsai of never completing her doctoral dissertation to get a doctoral degree in law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1984. He subsequently filed a declaratory action charging that
The Hualien Branch of the High Court today sentenced the main suspect in the 2021 fatal derailment of the Taroko Express to 12 years and six months in jail in the second trial of the suspect for his role in Taiwan’s deadliest train crash. Lee Yi-hsiang (李義祥), the driver of a crane truck that fell onto the tracks and which the the Taiwan Railways Administration's (TRA) train crashed into in an accident that killed 49 people and injured 200, was sentenced to seven years and 10 months in the first trial by the Hualien District Court in 2022. Hoa Van Hao, a
RSS