The NT$1.244 billion (US$42.5 million at the current exchange rate) fine given to Formosa Chemicals and Fibre Corp (FCFC, 台化) by the Changhua County Government was yesterday overruled by the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA).
In October 2016, the company’s Changhua plant was shut down after the Changhua Environmental Protection Bureau rejected its application to extend the coal permits for its three cogeneration boilers.
The coal used at the company’s M22 boiler from January 2008 to September 2016 did not correspond with the quality of coal it said it was using in its environmental report, the bureau said at the time.
The bureau issued the fine in November last year, saying that FCFC had breached Article 17 of the Environmental Impact Assessment Act (環境影響評估法) when it used lesser quality coal than claimed.
The company later that month filed an administrative appeal with the EPA.
The EPA Committee for Petitions and Appeals yesterday revoked the bureau’s administrative action at its final meeting on the case.
The bureau should have sampled and tested FCFC’s different coal sources to see how much of an impact their quality would have had on the environment, committee Executive Secretary Su Chung-kuang (蘇中光) said.
Using coal of varied quality does not necessarily result in more pollution, as the company might have spent more on regulating pollution, the committee said in its report, which was released yesterday.
The committee found that the company’s use of coal was “not always” of lesser quality during the January 2008 to September 2016 period, Su said.
The bureau also failed to observe that a penalty can cover a three-year period at most, as stipulated in the Administrative Penalty Act (行政罰法), so the company’s coal use before 2014 should not have been considered in the fine, Su said.
While the bureau referenced the NT$440 million penalty that the Hualien Environmental Protection Bureau handed Taiwan Cement Corp’s (台灣水泥) Ho-ping Power Co (和平電廠), the two cases are not comparable because the FCFC did not, like the power plant, generate more electricity than promised in its report, he said.
The bureau yesterday said it was discussing how to respond to the EPA’s ruling, and had not responded as of press time last night.
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
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the