Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators yesterday urged Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to make public the details of his salary accounts as well as a full list of names of Taipei City Government staffers who have received rewards from his mayoral special allowance fund.
DPP Legislator Lin Kuo-ching (林國慶) told a press conference that since Ma's special allowance was remitted into the mayor's salary account, prosecutors should investigate the account to understand how Ma spent the money.
He added that they should also consider freezing his accounts in order to prevent any details about them from being altered since Ma's wife works at the International Commercial Bank of China -- now known as Mega Bank -- where Ma holds one of his accounts.
DPP Legislator Chen Hsien-chung (陳憲中), who was also at the conference, said Ma had failed to detail who he had rewarded with his mayoral special allowance over the past eight years in the name list the city government announced last Saturday, which prompted Chen's suspicion of illegal goings on with the name lists.
He urged Prosecutor Hou Kuan-jen (侯寬仁) to investigate whether the city government was trying to falsify the name lists.
Meanwhile, DPP Legislator Hsieh Hsin-ni (謝欣霓) told a separate press conference that she had evidence showing that some of the 3,754 receipts that were connected with Ma's special allowance involved purchases of women's underwear.
reason
Hsieh said the purchases showed that the reason why city government staffer Yu Wen (
In response, Taipei City Government Secretariat Director Lee Sush-der(李述德) told a press conference yesterday that the city government would cooperate with prosecutors if they ask for the mayor's account details or name lists.
But Lee said the city government had explained everything for now and it would not make these things public just because legislators asked it to do so.
He added that there were no private purchases in the special allowance receipts as Hsieh mentioned, but he was not sure if the receipts Yu used to replace the government's contained such purchases.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
THE TOUR: Pope Francis has gone on a 12-day visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore. He was also invited to Taiwan The government yesterday welcomed Pope Francis to the Asia-Pacific region and said it would continue extending an invitation for him to visit Taiwan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the remarks as Pope Francis began a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific on Monday. He is to travel about 33,000km by air to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, and would arrive back in Rome on Friday next week. It would be the longest and most challenging trip of Francis’ 11-year papacy. The 87-year-old has had health issues over the past few years and now uses a wheelchair. The ministry said
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi