Former Taipei EasyCard Corp chairman Sean Lien (連勝文) yesterday said he will announce next month whether he will join the Taipei mayoral election.
As the most competitive candidate for the pan-blue camp’s Taipei mayoral race, Lien said that personal safety is a major concern for his election bid.
He said that he and his family have received threatening letters over the past two years following an incident in 2010 in which he was shot in the cheek during campaign activities in New Taipei City (新北市).
Photo: CNA
“There are still issues to be considered… When you have had a bullet in your face, you have to consider personal safety,” Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) member Lien said.
The shooting made him shun politics until recently, and his family, especially his wife, is concerned about his safety should he decide to run in the Taipei mayoral election.
Lien’s father, former vice president Lien Chan (連戰), has said that he will respect his son’s decision, but expressed concerns that smear campaigns targeting him from within the pan-blue camp may emerge if he decides to seek the party’s nomination in the race.
Meanwhile, Sean Lien also defended the legality of his investment in Ting Hsin International Group Taiwan depositary receipts (TDRs), denying allegations of business relations with the troubled company.
He said he received an NT$18,000 refund from the handling fees because the Financial Supervisory Commission said it had overcharged him for handling the TDR issue and ordered it to refund investors.
The fee was not a kickback, he added.
“I don’t know what mistakes I made besides the fact that I might want to join the Taipei mayoral election,” Sean Lien said.
As to the KMT’s alleged calls for him to move out of his residence in The Palace (帝寶), a luxury apartment complex on Renai Road in Taipei, in a bid to avoid suffering at the ballot box because of his wealthy background, Sean Lien said the move could be seen as a “pretentious” act, but said he would handle the issue if he decides to run.
He shrugged off allegations about smear campaigns coming from within the KMT and said he has already faced vicious attacks in the past.
“If I became angry over these attacks and was constantly thinking about vengeance, I would not be able to serve the public,” he said.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the KMT have dismissed allegations that the party is not supportive of Sean Lien’s bid because of Ma’s problematic relationship with Lien Chan, saying that the party will give full support to all its candidates once they are determined by the primary mechanism.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the