The losses sustained by hundreds of Taiwan-invested firms during recent anti-China protest in Vietnam is estimated at between US$1.5 billion and US$5 billion, the Executive Yuan was told yesterday.
Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Shen Jong-chin (沈榮津) yesterday briefed a task force led by Vice Premier Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) about a fact-finding trip he undertook to Vietnam last week.
The trip was to assess the damages caused to properties owned by Taiwanese investors when Vietnamese staged protests on May 13 and 14 against China because of its deployment of an oil rig near the disputed Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島) in the South China Sea.
The latest statistics provided by Shen was that 358 Taiwan-operated factories were attacked by Vietnamese during the protests and 21 firms were set on fire.
During their visit in Vietnam, Shen visited several Taiwanese chambers of commerce and sat down with Vietnamese officials to raise compensation issues, including with Vietnamese Planning and Investment Minister Bui Quang Vinh.
Meanwhile, Minister of Foreign Affairs David Lin (林永樂) reiterated the demands that Taiwan has made to Vietnam over the attack against Taiwanese facilities at a meeting with Vietnamese Minister of Industry and Trade Vu Huy Hoang on Monday, the ministry’s spokesperson, Anna Kao (高安), said yesterday.
Lin urged the Vietnamese government to come up with concrete measures to ensure the safety of Taiwanese businessmen and expatriates in the country, compensate Taiwanese businessmen for their losses and restore Taiwanese businessmen’s confidence in investing in Vietnam, Kao said.
Separately, the second delegation of psychologists and psychiatrists organized by the Ministry of Health and Welfare departed for Vietnam yesterday to provide counseling and psychotherapy to help Taiwanese businesspeople and expatriates recover from possible trauma, Executive Yuan spokesperson Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群) said yesterday.
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
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
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,