Prosecutors have launched an investigation into two Taipei City Hospital executives over allegations of siphoning off about NT$3 million (US$97,399) of public funds while procuring medicine.
The hospital is administered by the Taipei City Government.
The Taipei Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office and the Ministry of Justice’s Agency Against Corruption on Tuesday raided the hospital’s offices and several other locations, and brought in 15 people for questioning.
Photo: Chen En-hui, Taipei Times
Prosecutors have named five suspects, including Chen Li-chi (陳立奇), head of the hospital’s department of pharmacy; a woman also surnamed Chen (陳), who is head of the department’s inventory control section; and a person surnamed Lee (李), who works at the Taiwan Society of Health-System Pharmacists.
Prosecutors yesterday asked a court to detain Chen Li-chi, while the woman surnamed Chen was released on NT$200,000 bail and Lee on NT$50,000 bail.
Prosecutors said that the two Chens as society members from 2015 to 2016 helped the society secure three tender contracts from the Taipei Department of Health to provide long-term care to senior citizens, which included procuring medication and delivering to home-care patients.
The five suspects allegedly produced falsified documents and bogus receipts to claim extra medication and other expenses in collusion with medication suppliers, and placed the illegal gains in bank accounts of society members, prosecutors said.
The suspects would be charged with forgery and breaches of the Anti-Corruption Act (貪汙治罪條例), prosecutors said, adding that evidence pointed to Chen Li-chi as the ringleader, which was why they requested he be detained.
The city government is “a group of more than 80,000 people, so you cannot expect everyone to be a saint,” Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said yesterday.
There might even be some Taipei police officers who still take bribes, but at least the administrative team — especially department heads — are not involved in any major corruption cases, he said.
The scandal involving the hospital is being handled by prosecutors, Ko added.
Ko during his re-election campaign last year often said that his team was “open, transparent, honest and upright.”
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS