Taipei Agricultural Products Marketing Co general manager Han Kuo-yo (韓國瑜) yesterday filed a libel lawsuit against Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Tuan Yi-kang (段宜康) for “fabricating lies” about him.
Tuan yesterday accused Han of using the company’s funds to buy large quantities of boxed peaches grown by one of the company’s directors at greatly inflated prices, before repackaging and gifting them to the company’s employees during this year’s Dragon Boat Festival.
Han during last month’s Mid-Autumn Festival holiday gave his employees boxes of grapefruit he purchased the same way, Tuan said.
Tuan said that the company has not dutifully monitored produce and that consumers have to deal with the resulting price hikes, which translated into the company’s revenue, thus creating a “myth” that Han has done a stellar job as general manager.
Tuan, a former member of the DPP’s now-disbanded New Tide faction, urged Han to present facts.
According to Han, the New Tide faction and Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) allegedly engineered a plan to have him removed him from the company after it elected a new president.
However, as the DPP and Ko only managed to secure two seats on the company’s seven-member board of directors in an election on Wednesday, that plan has met with uncertainty.
The firm’s staffing is reportedly in limbo due to a internecine conflict between its directors, Tuan said on Facebook, accusing Han of improperly benefiting the firm’s directors and accusing his company of negligence in ensuring reasonable produce prices.
Han criticized an ongoing investigation into speculations that the firm drove up produce prices to persecute his company.
The company’s funding comes from a mix of public and private sources, with the Taipei City Government and the Council of Agriculture together contributing 45.5 percent and the Taiwan Provincial Fruit Marketing Cooperative, farmers’ associations and vegetable growers providing the rest.
Although the DPP’s faction were officially dissolved in 2006, most DPP politicians maintain loose alliances that share close ideologies.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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