Yunlin County Commissioner Su Chih-fen (蘇治芬) insisted on Monday that NT$1 billion (US$34.5 million) donated by Formosa Plastics Group (FPG) had entered the county’s coffers and was not being used to try to bribe the government.
The money has become the focus of the Yunlin County Council after Yunlin Councilor Lee Chien-chih (李建志) first grilled county officials on the remittance, which was made last month.
Critics speculated the contribution was intended to sway the county from fulfilling its responsibility to monitor the industrial safety of the group’s petrochemical complex in Mailiao Township (麥寮), allegations that Su has denied.
“The money has entered the county’s coffers and there is no question about it not being transparent. Only if the money is remitted into a private bank account is it considered not transparent,” Su said.
FPG has said the donation was a gesture to give back to the county and was to be exclusively used to help the county stage an agricultural expo in 2013.
Meanwhile, hundreds of melon growers and fishermen from two villages in Yunlin County gathered outside Formosa Plastics’ petrochemical complex to protest the facility’s impact on their livelihoods.
They demanded that the company agree within 10 days to honor the promise of its late founder Wang Yung-ching (王永慶) to set up a stabilization fund of NT$10 billion to take care of farmers and fishermen in the area.
Otherwise, the protesters said, they would block the road and the Mailiao industrial port.
The fishermen said they used to catch NT$2 million worth of fish annually before the complex opened, but because of the impact of environmental pollution, their income is now less than one-quarter of what it used to be.
At the same time, farmers complained they had lost more than NT$7 million cultivating 100 hectares of watermelon fields, possibly because of waste emitted by the complex.
Yunlin County Councilor Lin Shen (林深) said past county councilors had not asked the group to follow through on its promise and that the group’s pledge had since fallen to NT$3 billion over the next four years, starting this year.
Lin said the county government had used the money collected to date to subsidize farmers’ cooperatives or farmers’ associations and had not “really channeled the funds to take care of the livelihood of the fishermen.”
The county ordered six of the Formosa Plastics Group complex’s more than 60 factories to suspend work for improvements on June 1 and two of the six restarted operations on July 11.
Following the latest fires on July 26 and July 30, the factories affected by those fires were also shut down.
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