Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chiayi mayoral candidate Chen Yi-chen (陳以真) and her campaign team were accused of vote-buying yesterday by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Twu Shiing-jer’s (涂醒哲) campaign staff.
Chen and her team have been reportedly been offering NT$1,000 to registered voters for each of their votes, Twu’s staff said.
They said they had sufficient evidence, including telephone conversations, audio recordings and Line messages to support their allegations and they went to the Chiayi District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday to file a request for an investigation.
Photo: Ting Wei-chieh, Taipei Times
The campaign office’s secretary-general, Hsu Shih-chieh (許世杰), said Chen should quit the race.
“Chen Yi-chen should be ashamed. We ask that she withdraw from the election now,” Hsu told a news conference.
According to Twu’s campaign staff, a Chiayi resident provided an audio recording and Line message as evidence, and signed a document agreeing to the filing of a request for an judicial investigation.
The woman, who lives in the east of the city, said a betel-nut vendor telephoned her on Oct. 31 and told her to vote for Chen, offering her NT$1,000 for the vote.
When she told the man that there are four eligible voters in her family, the man said he would give her NT$4,000 for the votes and asked her to collect the money at his betel-nut stall on Nov. 2.
When the woman went to collect the money, she said she was reminded to vote for Chen.
The woman said she later felt regret because Chiayi was one of the centers of Taiwan’s democracy movement in the 1980s, and should not be sullied by vote-buying, so she went to Twu’s campaign office to report the incident.
Chen issued a statement last night saying she always insisted on a clean campaign and accusing Twu’s campaign office of fabricating the story.
Chen said she plans to instruct her lawyer to sue Twu for slander and malicious accusation.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS