The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday criticized Premier Jiang Yi-huah’s (江宜樺) choice of location for his apology on Thursday for the latest food scandals.
Jiang proffered the apology at a campaign rally for Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei mayoral candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) on Thursday night, even though he had attended a news conference on food safety that the Executive Yuan held earlier in the afternoon.
DPP spokesperson Huang Di-ying (黃帝穎) said Jiang told the news conference that he was “a person who prefers solving a problem to apologizing,” yet just hours later he bowed to Lien’s supporters and apologized for the food scares.
“Are KMT supporters the only ones who could be treated as human beings?” Huang said.
Is there a political divide in the people who have consumed tainted oil all these years?” he said.
Jiang’s making an apology after saying that such a move was superfluous was “a slap in his own face,” as well as showing a lack of sincerity, since it was clearly motivated by political considerations for the KMT’s election chances, Huang said.
The DPP spokesman excoriated the premier for following President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) lead in trying to pass the buck for the recent scandal to the previous DPP administration.
While Jiang said sales of the problematic oil from Vietnam-based manufacturer Dai Hanh Phuc Co (大幸福公司) to Ting Hsin International Group (頂新國際集團) and Cheng I Food Co Ltd (正義) began in 2005 during the DPP’s administration, he overlooked that Ting Hsin was first charged in connection with use of adulterated oil by the Changhua District Prosecutors’ Office in January 2012, Huang said.
According to a news release from prosecutors at the time, Ting Hsin and Wei Ying-chun (魏應充) “had since January 2012 been adulterating and counterfeiting cooking oil with fodder oil,” Huang said.
Ma had, on Dec. 21, 2011, handed Wei the post of vice president of a “fan club for Ma and Wu” [Vice President Wu Den-yih (吳敦義)] made up of business representatives, ahead of the 2012 presidential election, Huang said.
That meant that just 10 days after Ma presented Wei with a certificate, Ting Hsin had started to make substandard oil, the spokesman said.
Ma had once called Ting Hsin “invigorating medicine” for Taiwan’s economy, but Jiang chose to “selectively forget” those things to help Ma shirk responsibility for the scandal, Huang said.
He said Jiang should make public the full dispersal of the 33,000 tonnes of substandard oil from Vietnam, not offer insincere apologies.
In related news, the Executive Yuan yesterday said that it will be live streaming a program on Nov. 18 in which Cabinet ministers would have real-time interaction with viewers who had posted questions online about food safety.
The format of the program, which is scheduled to begin at 7pm, was chosen so that more people could participate, officials said.
Questions began being collected via Google Moderator yesterday and can be submitted through Friday next week.
The questions that are to be answered by Minister of Health and Welfare Chiang Been-huang (蔣丙煌) will be those that earn more than 50 votes within three days of posting or receive more than 100 votes before question-submission period ends, the officials said.
Additional reporting by Alison Hsiao
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