A Vietnamese court has rejected hundreds of lawsuits filed by fishermen who demanded more compensation from a Taiwanese-owned steel plant responsible for a devastating toxic leak, a leading activist said on Saturday.
In a rare case of civic action in authoritarian Vietnam, crowds of fishermen last month swamped a courthouse to file 506 lawsuits against Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團), which is constructing a multibillion-dollar steel plant in Ha Tinh Province.
The conglomerate paid Vietnam’s government US$500 million after it was blamed of dumping waste that poisoned fish and decimated the local seafood industry earlier this year.
Local fishermen launched their lawsuits in an effort to wrest more money from Formosa and demand that it shut down the steel operation altogether.
However, Catholic priest Dang Huu Nam, who helped lead the plaintiffs, told reporters the court had returned more than 100 case files and that he was expecting more.
“We will look into why the files were returned, as the court did not say concretely, before deciding what moves to do next,” Nam said.
Judge Nguyen Van Thang was quoted in state-run media as saying that all 506 cases were returned.
The fishermen had asked for compensation of about US$2.5 million, but did not provide clear evidence of their losses, Phap Luat, an official legal news site, quoted the judge as saying.
Dead fish and other marine life began washing up on Vietnam’s central coast in April, hitting fishermen and triggering rounds of protests.
After weeks of obfuscation, the government laid blame on Formasa, which has a history of environmental scandals spanning the globe, and ordered the conglomerate to pay a US$500 million fine.
The government said it would this month start distributing the cash to affected fishermen and last month confirmed that payouts would range from US$130 to US$1,600 per person.
Thousands of Vietnamese protesters on Oct. 2 surrounded the steel plant, with some scaling its walls and holding signs demanding its closure.
Vietnam’s communist rulers tolerate little dissent, but anger over corruption and environmental degradation often spark significant protests.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
DIVIDED VIEWS: Although the Fed agreed on holding rates steady, some officials see no rate cuts for this year, while 10 policymakers foresee two or more cuts There are a lot of unknowns about the outlook for the economy and interest rates, but US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell signaled at least one thing seems certain: Higher prices are coming. Fed policymakers voted unanimously to hold interest rates steady at a range of 4.25 percent to 4.50 percent for a fourth straight meeting on Wednesday, as they await clarity on whether tariffs would leave a one-time or more lasting mark on inflation. Powell said it is still unclear how much of the bill would fall on the shoulders of consumers, but he expects to learn more about tariffs
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market