Taipei City Government’s Clean Government Committee is to reconsider where to send its Taipei Dome investigation request after it was rejected by the Ministry of Justice.
“The Clean Government Committee is to hold further discussions [on the city’s next steps],” Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said, adding that the city government is able to “block punches as they come.”
He declined to specify the next step the city would take, saying that it was necessary to respect the independence of the committee, which was established early this year to investigate controversial city development projects.
The city government had reported the Taipei Dome case to the Ministry of Justice, after a Clean Government Committee investigation into negotiations over the Taipei Dome’s build-operate-transfer (BOT) project accused former city finance commissioner Lee Sush-der (李述德) and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) — during his terms as Taipei mayor — of illegally profiting contractor the Farglory Group (遠雄集團).
The ministry yesterday officially rejected the city’s Wednesday referral, saying it was not responsible for handling specific lawsuits or investigating the executive responsibility of officials in other departments.
It said that the city should report the case to prosecutors or other judicial authorities, while also rejecting the city’s referral of the MeHAS City case.
The decision drew a strong response from Clean Government Committee members.
“Minister of Justice Luo Ying-shay (羅瑩雪) has proved that she is a useless minister who swallows cases,” committee member and lawyer Cheng Wen-lung (鄭文龍) said on Facebook.
He said that according to Control Yuan practice, the results of investigations are sent to the ministry, which then sends them on to relevant agencies for further investigation.
The ministry’s action shows that it could only “swallow” cases directed at the president and other high-ranking government officials, he said.
While the committee had followed the practice of the Control Yuan in referring the case to the Ministry of Justice, the ministry’s rejection was “expected” because it is not legally responsible to help the committee to determine which government agency should investigate the case, Department of Government Ethics Commissioner Liu Ming-wu (劉明武) said.
He said he would recommend that the committee refer its investigation results for the Dome case directly to the Agency Against Government Corruption — which has already opened an investigation.
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