The Consumers' Foundation (
This was the first time the non-profit organization had taken legal action against government officials since it was established in 1980.
"Tsai and Yang Hsi-an (
The foundation had claimed in late September it would file a lawsuit against the transportation authorities if they did not respond to the group's call to immediately terminate the ETC system's operations and return the exclusive ETC toll lanes to general traffic.
In early August, the Administrative Supreme Court voided a partnership between the transportation ministry and the privately owned Far Eastern Electronic Toll Collection Co (遠通電收) over the build-operate-transfer project, citing an unfair bidding process.
However, the government has disregarded the ruling and continued to allow Far Eastern Electronic to run the system, which led many people to suspect that there might be some kind of collusion involved, Cheng said.
Far Eastern Electronic is reportedly demanding service fees three times the current level during the interim period before a second round of bidding is conducted.
Lang Ya-ling (
She refused to provide details of any financial losses incurred. The Taiwan Area National Freeway Bureau pays the firm NT$180 million (US$5.4 million) per month to operate the ETC system, but the minimum monthly expenditure runs to NT$450 million, Lang said.
Far Eastern Electronic, which started providing the ETC service in February, forecast in late March it might see losses of NT$2.7 billion by the end of the year.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
TECH RACE: The Chinese firm showed off its new Mate XT hours after the latest iPhone launch, but its price tag and limited supply could be drawbacks China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) yesterday unveiled the world’s first tri-foldable phone, as it seeks to expand its lead in the world’s biggest smartphone market and steal the spotlight from Apple Inc hours after it debuted a new iPhone. The Chinese tech giant showed off its new Mate XT, which users can fold three ways like an accordion screen door, during a launch ceremony in Shenzhen. The Mate XT comes in red and black and has a 10.2-inch display screen. At 3.6mm thick, it is the world’s slimmest foldable smartphone, Huawei said. The company’s Web site showed that it has garnered more than
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) and Episil Technologies Inc (漢磊) yesterday announced plans to jointly build an 8-inch fab to produce silicon carbide (SiC) chips through an equity acquisition deal. SiC chips offer higher efficiency and lower energy loss than pure silicon chips, and they are able to operate at higher temperatures. They have become crucial to the development of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence data centers, green energy storage and industrial devices. Vanguard, a contract chipmaker focused on making power management chips and driver ICs for displays, is to acquire a 13 percent stake in Episil for NT$2.48 billion (US$77.1 million).
RSS