Two Kaohsiung politicians on Saturday said former Kaohsiung mayor Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) steered illegal profits of NT$5.4 billion (US$175.52 million) to the builder of the Kaohsiung Arena and should be referred to prosecutors for investigation.
Kaohsiung City councilors Huang Po-lin (黃柏霖) and Chen Li-na (陳麗娜) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) made the accusation one day after a Taipei committee referred President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to the Ministry of Justice on suspicion of unlawfully steering financial benefits to the main contractor of the Taipei Dome project when he served as Taipei mayor.
The committee said Ma did not require Farglory Land Development Co (遠雄建設) to pay any royalties on the project when signing the contract with the developer, deviating from the norm for build-operate-transfer (BOT) projects.
According to Huang and Chen, a similar irregularity arose with the construction of the Kaohsiung Arena, a BOT project launched during Hsieh’s tenure.
The Kaohsiung City Government, which invested NT$1.5 billion in the project, did not require any royalties, and only collects NT$26 million in rent and NT$33 million in property tax from the builder every year, they said.
Under the contract, the builder has the right to operate the Kaohsiung Arena for 50 years until 2054.
The Kaohsiung Arena generated revenue of NT$9.3 billion last year, which means that its total revenue could reach an estimated NT$390 billion over the next 40 years, the councilors said.
If the city government had originally required 1 percent of the revenue in royalties, it would be able to obtain NT$3.9 billion over the next four decades, they said.
If the NT$1.5 billion invested by the city government is taken into account, the total financial benefits conceded would be NT$5.4 billion, they said.
In response, the Kaohsiung Public Works Bureau said the city government did not require royalties on the Kaohsiung Arena project because, based on an estimate, the revenue of the Kaohsiung Arena would be insufficient to cover its construction costs.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS