Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei mayoral candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) yesterday again refused to declare his assets, but said he would like to have his property audited on condition that independent Taipei mayoral candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) would do the same.
If Ko agrees to an audit, he would contact the Certified Public Accountants Association in Taipei to examine both his and Ko’s financial status and produce reports on their respective assets, Lien said.
Lien suggested that an audit should look at how he and Ko had used public funds during their stints as Taipei EasyCard Corp chairman and head of National Taiwan University Hospital’s Department of Surgery respectively, the property declarations they both submitted to the Taipei City Election Commission, as well as any assets they would declare to the Control Yuan in the future.
Ko on Sept. 18 made public his tax records and statements pertaining to his personal bank account and two hospital bank accounts he had access to, partly in response to an allegation of corruption leveled by KMT Legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾), who accused him of money laundering via that account when serving as head of the hospital’s surgical intensive care unit. Ko called on Lien to make a similar disclosure.
Lien has not agreed to do so. On Monday night, while Lien was having an online chat with netizens, he said that he did not see any reason why he had to do something he was not legally obliged to do.
In response to media queries yesterday about his willingness to declare his assets to the public, Lien said that there was no credibility in financial statements released without being certified by a registered accountant.
He then urged Ko to agree to his proposal for an audit.
Meanwhile, Lien yesterday displayed a notice of a shareholders’ meeting he said he had received from Golden Meditech Holdings Limited last week to rebut the claims of netizens that he had profited from selling his personal holdings in the company’s Taiwan depositary receipts (TDRs).
Lien had vowed earlier that he would drop out of the mayoral race if it is proven that he has profited from any transaction of the company’s TDRs.
He was accused of cheating investors because TDRs of the Chinese healthcare company, which he has strongly endorsed, fell to nearly one-third of their initial value after the company listed the TDRs on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Lien’s campaign office yesterday unveiled a list of 108 professionals who act as Lien’s consultants, led by former Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp chairman and CEO Ou Chin-der (歐晉德), and including former minister of the interior Lee Hong-yuan (李鴻源) and former deputy secretary-general of the presidential office Liu Pao-kui (劉寶貴).
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