The Taipei City Government yesterday made an apparent U-turn on its stance on negotiating with Taipei Dome contractor Farglory Group to dissolve the contract for the stalled build-operate-transfer project, opting instead for direct dissolution of the contract.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily reported that the Taipei Department of Sports yesterday morning delivered an official document to Farglory headquarters, urging the company to make amends for its breaches of contract, including 79 deviations from the approved construction blueprint and allowing construction to fall seriously behind schedule.
“Should Farglory refuse to comply, the Taipei City Government would resort to the mandates stipulated in articles 19.4.2 and 21.1.3 and take necessary action accordingly,” the document reportedly said.
Article 19.4.2 reads: “If Party B [Farglory] fails to make improvements after a certain period of time starting from the seventh month after the project has been taken over, or its construction or operations has been suspended, Party A [Taipei City Government] may terminate this contract.”
Article 21.1.3 reads: “Party A may terminate this contract over causes attributable to Party B.”
Both terms are cited only when the city government wants to proactively terminate the contract, indicating that the “negotiation” approach it proposed last month could be facing imminent failure, the report said.
The move came ahead of a presentation on the Dome that Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) is scheduled to make on Monday to the Taipei City Council.
A source in Taipei City Hall, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak on the issue, quoted Farglory as having said that if the two parties were to negotiate a dissolution, the city must make a deposit equivalent to the settlement to a third-party account, a move the Taipei City Council has made clear it will not approve.
Taipei City Government spokesman Sidney Lin (林鶴明) said that in delivering the documents, the department was simply exercising its authority by urging Farglory to make the necessary improvements within the legal and contractual parameters.
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:
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