Prosecutors and lawmakers have put together separate teams to investigate alleged negligence involving the awarding of a now-defaulted NT$22.1 billion (US$732.5 million) syndicated loan from nine state-run banks to Ching Fu Shipbuilding Co.
The Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office, which is spearheading the investigation, has assembled a team of 11 prosecutors to expedite the probe.
After the Executive Yuan on Thursday released a report detailing negligence by the Ministry of National Defense and First Bank, the office increased the scope of its investigation into excessive loaning to Ching Fu to include potential illegality in the bidding process for a minesweeper-building contract.
The office on Wednesday sent Investigation Bureau personnel to the ministry to seize dozens of boxes of paperwork related to the government’s planned procurement of the minesweepers.
Meanwhile, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政), who is heading an ad hoc investigation team for the case under the legislature’s Foreign and National Defense Committee, said the team had received 1,419 documents from the ministry and would endeavor to identify suspicious aspects of the procurement that the Executive Yuan has yet to clarify.
One of the documents shows that a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmaker had twice requested the ministry’s call-for-bids announcement, Lo said.
The documents also show that CSBC Corp, Taiwan (台船), Ching Fu’s primary competitor in the bidding process, filed a complaint against the procurement with the Public Construction Commission, which then held at least seven meetings with the ministry, Ching Fu and CSBC to review the process.
The legislature’s Finance Committee is also set to start viewing documents and launch an investigation into the scandal after passing draft guidelines for the operation of the committee’s ad-hoc investigation subcommittee.
Meanwhile, Ching Fu vice chairman Chen Wei-chih (陳偉志), who was released on bail last month, has canceled a request to play a two-day tennis match in Taichung today and tomorrow out of concern over “projecting a negative image.”
Prosecutors had allowed Chen to report to a Taichung police station instead of his local police station today and tomorrow, but Chen apparently changed his mind after the media reported on his plan to play in the competition.
His father, Ching Fu president Chen Ching-nan (陳慶男), and mother Lu Chao-hsia (盧昭霞), both of whom are defendants in the case, have also been instructed to report to the police station on Kaohsiung’s Fusing Road.
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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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