The government should not have let the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) lead an administrative investigation into Mega International Commercial Bank’s violation of US rules against money laundering, New Power Party Executive Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said.
People have been mostly concerned with the suspected money-laundering activities, which have been put under judicial investigation, Huang said in a radio interview yesterday.
However, “as a lawmaker I am more concerned about the administrative negligence and the question of who will foot the bill for the US$180 million fine levied on Mega Bank,” he added.
The incident “has made us highly suspicious of internal controls at the bank and the role of the FSC, because we know now, despite the FSC’s initial claims of innocence when the incident was first reported, that the bank’s Australian branch made similar violations in 2009, and its two branches in Panama were fined in 2010 and 2012 for flaunting Panama’s regulations against money laundering,” Huang said.
That the branches in Panama were fined was reported to the bank’s board of directors and to the FSC, Huang said.
“I wonder whether it was the top echelons at the bank and FSC who failed to regard the matter as something of importance,” he said.
Huang said he has been “deeply disappointed” by the moves made by the Ministry of Finance and the FSC so far.
“Besides Mega Financial Holding Co chairman Shiu Kuang-si (徐光曦) being allowed to investigate misconduct at his bank, I have also found it ridiculous that the administrative investigation is led by the FSC, an agency that is likely to be found guilty of administrative negligence” over past violations, he said.
“This makes us doubt the determination of the Executive Yuan to carry out a full investigation of the incident and question whether it only wants to have those involved to continue their mutual cover-ups,” Huang said.
Regarding the question of who will pay the fines, the lawmaker said he “almost passed out” when he heard Deputy Minister of Finance Su Jain-rong (蘇建榮) say on Monday that there is no plan on the ministry’s part to take legal action against former Mega Financial chairman Mckinney Tsai (蔡友才).
“It is now clear that there was negligence on the bank’s part and Tsai had been the chairman the whole time when the misconduct took place, while Shiu was the general manager. In terms of protecting creditors’ rights, I do not think small shareholders and taxpayers would be happy to see that they are the ones who will cover the fine,” Huang said.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
RISK FACTORS: ‘We hope people can cooperate and endure it ... it is possibly the very important last mile,’ Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung said Taiwan’s COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations are to remain the same next month, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday. The center reported 42,112 new local COVID-19 cases and 85 deaths, saying that the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has dropped to a new low this month. Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the CECC, said that the center is keeping COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations the same due to the local virus situation, and an increase in the number of imported cases of the new Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2, among other risk factors. Easing
GLOBAL STRATEGY: Indo-Pacific alliances need reinforcement to prevent Chinese occupation of Taiwan, which would threaten Japan, Hawaii and Australia, Pompeo said The US should officially recognize Taiwan as a free, independent nation and establish official diplomatic ties, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo told an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington on Friday. Every US president since Harry Truman has considered Taiwan’s existence to be of utmost importance to US national security, Pompeo said. Taiwan is a principal US partner in technology and economic matters, and if China were to capture Taiwan’s semiconductor supply chain, it would severely hamper the US economy, Pompeo said. Should China occupy Taiwan, it would severely weaken US influence in the Indo-Pacific region and its surrounding areas,
RSS