The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) yesterday ordered Yoho Beach Resort to stop operations and said it would fine the resort for operating illegally at the Kenting National Park in Pingtung County’s Hengchun Township (恆春).
A recent report claimed that the resort, occupying 15,750m2 of land in the national park, has been operating for 14 years without obtaining environmental impact assessment (EIA) approval. That prompted EPA Minister Stephen Shen (沈世宏) to order an inspection of all development projects across the nation.
After a three-hour meeting hosted by Shen yesterday, the EPA, the Pingtung County Government and the Ministry of the Interior’s Construction and Planning Agency, which is in charge of national park headquarters, agreed that the resort had been operating illegally.
Yeh Jiunn-horng (葉俊宏), director-general of the EPA’s Comprehensive Planning Department, said the developer applied to turn the area into “congregate housing” twice, in 1994 and 1995, before the standards for determining that the establishment of new communities needed EIA approval, so the resort could operate legally as “congregate housing.”
However, the resort had only applied to change two of its six areas into a “tourist hotel” in 1993 and obtained an operating license from the local government in 1996, when it had already finished the construction and began operation in all six areas, Yeh said.
“We determined that the developer has violated the spirit of the EIA act by splitting the whole area into small pieces of less than 1 hectare each to avoid going through the EIA process,” he said.
As a result, participants at the meeting reached a consensus that the hotel’s operating license is invalid, he said.
The EPA will also fine the resort after it finishes calculating the “illegal gains” it made during this period.
Construction and Planning Agency deputy director-general She Wun-long (許文龍) said the agency respects the decisions made by the EPA, and it will ask the local government to suspend all operations at the resort until it gains EIA approval.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
US President Donald Trump said "it’s up to" Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be "very unhappy" with a change in the "status quo," the New York Times said in an interview published yesterday. Xi "considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing," Trump told the newspaper on Wednesday. "But I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that," he added. "I hope he doesn’t do that." Trump made the comments in
RSS