A lawmaker yesterday presented documents that he said proved a prominent cram-school teacher allegedly involved in a sex scandal had engaged in bid rigging and collusion to obtain government agency contracts totaling NT$300 million (US$9.98 million).
The teacher, who is well-known in Taiwan’s cram school industry and has been teaching high-school students across the nation for two decades, went into hiding after he was accused by Kaohsiung City Councilor Hsiao Jung-ta (蕭永達) on Tuesday of seducing and sexually assaulting female high-school students under his charge.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) went public with documents accusing the teacher, surnamed Chen, of bid rigging and collusion.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
“We know that some crimes, such as sexual assault, are difficult to prosecute due to the statute of limitations. However, now we have concrete evidence that Chen has used illegal means to procure public tender contracts,” Lin said.
“Once we start the judicial process, Chen has to attend trial hearings in court, and if convicted, he would have to serve jail time,” he added.
Chen is the main proprietor of a publishing company based in Taipei, which in the past 14 years has won numerous open tender bids in the public sector to produce promotional brochures, books and year-end reports for public agencies, including the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the Taipei City Government, the state-own CPC Corp, Taiwan, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and municipal governments.
“It is a small-scale company with NT$5 million in declared assets and only 10 employees, according to its business registration record, but Chen was able to win almost every public sector tender and defeated large Taiwanese media companies with far greater operating capital, annual turnover and business resources, such as Commonwealth Magazine Group, Taiwan Television Enterprise, Business Today Co and China Times Corp,” Lin said.
“Through our own fact-finding efforts, we found that Chen’s company had undue influence at various government agencies, helping him win the tender contract almost every time,” Lin said, adding that an official involved in the process had alleged that Chen had bribed several academics who sat on the evaluation committees for the tenders.
Lin said Chen’s company was in breach of the Government Procurement Act (政府採購法) and other laws, and demanded that the Ministry of Justice’s Agency Against Corruption conduct a judicial investigation.
Lin also accused Chen of fabricating his academic record.
Promotion for Chen’s cram schools touted him as holding a Master’s from National Sun Yat-sen University, “but we checked with university officials and they said Chen had never attended any course at their school,” Lin said.
He urged all students and parents who had paid tuition fees for courses at Chen’s schools to file a class-action lawsuit against him “so he will face justice and be punished for his crimes.”
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