Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday acknowledged that he had asked 18 officials suspected of leaking survey results to the media — thereby revealing Taipei city councilors’ inclinations on the Taipei Dome debacle — to leave his administration if they opt out of taking polygraph tests.
Ko made the remarks during a Taipei City Council session when answering questions from Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City Councilor Hsu Shu-hua (許淑華), who asked whether the city government has hired a “retired prosecutor” to conduct the polygraph tests.
Hsu was referring to a survey asking councilors what the city should do about the Taipei Dome, the results of which were allegedly leaked to online news outlet Storm Media in April.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
The leak drew criticism from the city councilors, who accused the city of attempting to shift its responsibility for the decisionmaking process for the scandal-plagued project onto city councilors.
Hsu cited a story published on Monday by the Chinese-langugage Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) as saying that Taipei Deputy Mayor Charles Lin’s (林欽榮) secretary, surnamed Huang (黃), is to be fired at the end of this month for allegedly making contact with a Storm Media reporter the day before the survey results were leaked and for refusing to take the test.
Saying the polygraph test was reminiscent of tactics used in the White Terror era, Hsu demanded that Ko’s administration not allow this to happen again.
Taipei Department of Government Ethics Commissioner Liou Ming-wu (劉明武) initially rejected the media report, calling it “entirely untrue,” adding that Ko would never have allowed repression of freedom of speech to take place in the city government.
Hsu later asked Ko whether he had instructed officials suspected of leaking information to leave his administration if they refused to comply with the test, to which Ko replied: “Yes.”
The conflicting remarks prompted Hsu to accuse Liou of lying.
“If this is not White Terror, then what is?” she asked.
Ko later clarified that the polygraph test was conducted outside Taipei City Hall, and that Liou’s reponse was meant to clarify that it was not administered by a retired prosecutor as Hsu alleged.
Liou said that results of the test had been delivered to Taipei City Council spokeswoman Wu Pi-chu’s (吳碧珠) office.
Hsu demanded Ko stop subjecting his subordinates to polygraph tests, but said that the mayor should mete out severe punishments for the people behind the leak.
“I believe that you know very well who the person behind the leak was,” she said, which Ko tacitly acknowledged.
In related news, Ko yesterday told the city council that he had made up his mind to terminate Farglory Group’s contract if it does not pass the safety reviews mandated by the city government and the Taiwan Architecture and Building Center, adding that the company “cannot act however it wants.”
Ko made the remark in response to a question from city councilors, who asked him to comment on a half-page advertisement Dome contractor Farglory took out in major Chinese-language newspapers yesterday.
In the advertisement, Farglory touted the Dome as “the world’s safest and most wonderful Dome” and accused Ko of sacrificing the facility to further his own political aims.
According to Farglory, Ko’s political schemes had “maligned Taiwan’s foremost construction team.”
Ko dismissed the advertisement as Farglory “unnecessarily wasting its energy.”
On the possibility that the city could be required to compensate Farglory should the contract be dissolved, Ko said that not one dollar would be drained from the city’s coffers and that he would seek alternatives to issuing monetary compensation.
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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