The Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted owners of Beei Hae Oil and Fats Co (北海油脂) on charges of fraud and violating the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法) for allegedly producing and selling adulterated oil.
Investigations uncovered that Lu Ching-hsieh (呂青協) and Huang Li-hua (黃麗華), husband-and-wife owners of the Tanan-based Beei Hae Oil and Fats Co, since January last year allegedly bought 965 tonnes of low-grade fats and oils which were not permitted for human consumption, including animal-feed oil and subcutaneous fat layers from hog hides intended for making leather products, for mixing with their own cooking oil.
The resulting mix was allegedly processed through the company’s distillation and refining operation to produce assorted lard oil and cooking oil products, with the sale of at least 1,511 tonnes for illicit gains of about NT$77.22 million (US$2.51 million), investigators said.
Prosecutors said the owners manufactured the adulterated oil from ingredients not permitted for human consumption, just to save on costs and reap higher profits.
They allegedly sold the products to 110 food companies in Taiwan, as well as exporting 218 tonnes to Hong Kong, investigators said.
Accusing the owners of producing and selling adulterated oil with a disregard for the possible damage to the health of consumers, and continuing to refuse to admit their guilt, the prosecutors yesterday requested the court impose the maximum punishment possible.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods