In the ongoing scandal over spending on the reconstruction of Taipei City’s Xinsheng Overpass, the Taiwan High Court asked the Taipei District Court to re-examine its decision to release two suspects on bail. Judges at the Taipei District Court reversed their previous decision and ordered the former head of the Taipei City Government’s New Construction Department and the boss of Join Engineering Consultants to be taken into custody. In the process, prosecutors discovered from among documents they found while searching the former department head’s home a report on the case by the city’s Department of Government Ethics.
Handwritten notes revealed that, even before prosecutors started questioning him, the former department head had already used the ethics office’s report to work out what answers to give. This also raises suspicions that he was coordinating his answers with other suspects and it clearly makes for a key point in the investigation of the case — the question of how the report was leaked.
The ethics office, for its part, declared that its investigation was just an administrative report with nothing secret about it, so the fact that the former department head had got hold of it did not constitute a leak. That interpretation would seem to imply that there is no need to hold anyone responsible for leaking the report. It goes to show that the ethics office is not fit to play any role in the case and leads one to wonder whether the ethics office is not itself complicit in the affair.
According to Article 3 of the Act of the Establishment of the Government Employee Ethics Units and Offices (政風機構人員設置條例), the Ministry of Justice is in charge of government employee ethics affairs, while Article 4 stipulates that government employee ethics units must be set up in all administrative organs at all levels. Although these units are subordinate to the administrative organs to which they belong, the official to whom they are answerable is not the person in charge of that organ, but the ministry.
The reason for this arrangement is that the main duty of these ethics units is to prevent corruption by inviting and processing reports of unlawful and unethical practices. It is necessary for them to have this kind of quasi-external status so as to effectively supervise the work of their respective administrative organs and make it more difficult for those organs to cover up their own misdeeds. The way ethics offices are set up is meant to prevent the people who work for them from getting into cahoots with other government employees and so ensure that they can thoroughly investigate any suspected corruption cases that might arise.
Unfortunately, it is often the case with laws that there is a big difference between what they are designed to do and the way they work in practice. In the Xinsheng Overpass case, for example, a number of companies made very high bids to do engineering work on the project, apparently with the purpose of forcing the government to increase its budget. That would constitute collusive bidding, which is a crime.
Yet the civil servants handling the tender played along with the bidders and they are now trying to shift responsibility for the decision onto their subordinates by claiming they were on sick leave and so on. Signs of collusion between city government officials and bidders were there early on and they point to the serious offense of reporting inflated prices for personal gain.
Even when people posted their suspicions on the Internet after auditors had examined the figures, the Department of Government Ethics ignored them. The ethics office is clearly incompetent, negligent or both.
Now, two years after the overpass work was put up for tender, some city councilors, legislators and media have uncovered the scandal, but still the ethics office has failed to investigate the case thoroughly. As if that were not bad enough, in the process of doing such investigations as it has, the office has again and again demonstrated its eagerness to protect its masters in the city government. It is likely, then, that the results of its investigations will not be impartial.
To make matters worse, it now transpires that someone directly implicated in the case could easily get hold of the investigation report. Although the staff of the ethics office are not judicial officials or police and their investigation is therefore of an arbitrary and administrative nature, that doesn’t mean documents relating to such an investigation are not confidential.
The Xinsheng Overpass case is not a matter of simple negligence or dereliction of duty, but one in which serious criminal activity is strongly suspected. The principle of secret investigation must therefore strictly apply to any documents relating to the case. Officers working on the investigation should keep any documents they receive confidential and anyone who allows them to be leaked should face a charge of divulging non-military state secrets. The ethics office’s claim that this report was not a confidential document is farfetched and it raises strong suspicions that the office is covering up for senior city government officials.
It is widely recognized that civil service ethics units have long since failed to fulfill their purpose, but now the Xinsheng Overpass scandal has exposed this fact for all to see. The Cabinet has already announced its intention to set up an anti-corruption administration, so in the future that will be the body responsible for the onerous task of fighting graft. The problem is that, according to existing plans, civil service ethics officers will play a leading role in the new body. In that case, the anti--corruption administration will be nothing but old wine in a new bottle and it will be a long time before the public’s hopes for clean and capable government become a reality.
Wu Ching-chin is an assistant professor of financial and economic law at Aletheia University.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sending soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and is learning lessons for a future war against Taiwan. Until now, the CCP has claimed that they have not sent PLA personnel to support Russian aggression. On 18 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy announced that the CCP is supplying war supplies such as gunpowder, artillery, and weapons subcomponents to Russia. When Zelinskiy announced on 9 April that the Ukrainian Army had captured two Chinese nationals fighting with Russians on the front line with details
On a quiet lane in Taipei’s central Daan District (大安), an otherwise unremarkable high-rise is marked by a police guard and a tawdry A4 printout from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicating an “embassy area.” Keen observers would see the emblem of the Holy See, one of Taiwan’s 12 so-called “diplomatic allies.” Unlike Taipei’s other embassies and quasi-consulates, no national flag flies there, nor is there a plaque indicating what country’s embassy this is. Visitors hoping to sign a condolence book for the late Pope Francis would instead have to visit the Italian Trade Office, adjacent to Taipei 101. The death of
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), joined by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), held a protest on Saturday on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei. They were essentially standing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is anxious about the mass recall campaign against KMT legislators. President William Lai (賴清德) said that if the opposition parties truly wanted to fight dictatorship, they should do so in Tiananmen Square — and at the very least, refrain from groveling to Chinese officials during their visits to China, alluding to meetings between KMT members and Chinese authorities. Now that China has been defined as a foreign hostile force,
On April 19, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) gave a public speech, his first in about 17 years. During the address at the Ketagalan Institute in Taipei, Chen’s words were vague and his tone was sour. He said that democracy should not be used as an echo chamber for a single politician, that people must be tolerant of other views, that the president should not act as a dictator and that the judiciary should not get involved in politics. He then went on to say that others with different opinions should not be criticized as “XX fellow travelers,” in reference to
RSS