Environmental groups yesterday filed an application with the Cabinet’s Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee requesting an investigation into whether the land on which state-run CPC Corp, Taiwan plans to build a liquefied natural gas terminal had been obtained legally.
CPC plans to build a gas terminal off the coast of Datan Borough (大潭) in Taoyuan’s Guanyin District (觀音) and expects it to start supplying gas to state-run Taiwan Power Co’s Datan Power Plant from 2022.
Environmentalists working to protect Datan’s ecosystem from damage by the project have recently shifted their focus to CPC’s allegedly questionable holding.
The coast belongs to the public and should not have been sold, as stipulated by the Land Act (土地法), Taoyuan Local Union director Pan Chong-cheng (潘忠政) told a news conference at the legislature in Taipei yesterday.
However, Tung Ting Gas Corp in 2003 bought the land for NT$1 billion (US$33.9 million at the current exchange rate) and CPC in 2016 acquired Tung Ting for about NT$2.2 billion after the latter failed to obtain the rights to transmit natural gas, he said.
The deal was possibly related to the KMT’s ill-gotten assets, given that 47.3 percent of Tung Ting’s shares were held by China Development Financial Holding Corp, which was owned by the party, he said.
A political party’s property could be considered ill-gotten if it was attained through disproportionate means after Aug. 15 1945, lawyer Chen Hsien-cheng (陳憲政) said, citing Article 5 of the Act Governing the Handling of Ill-gotten Properties by Political Parties and Their Affiliate Organizations (政黨及其附隨組織不當取得財產處理條例).
Transitional justice should come before environmental justice, New Power Party Legislator Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) said, calling on the government to clarify the legitimacy of CPC’s asset before continuing the project’s environmental impact assessment.
Taiwan Water Resources Protection Union director Jennifer Nien (粘麗玉) said the group would also petition the Control Yuan today to investigate the case.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift