The safety reviews of the Taipei Dome conducted by the Taiwan Architecture and Building Center should be annulled, as the center’s former chief executive has been implicated in the scandal involving contractor Farglory Group, environmental groups said yesterday.
At a press conference in front of the Ministry of the Interior building, Songshan Tobacco Factory Tree Protection Union convener Arthur Yo (游藝) urged the ministry to nullify the center’s safety certificate and weed out officials who were covering up for the group.
In 2012, Farglory Group began to construct the Dome on a build-operate-transfer contract with the Taipei City Government.
Photo: Wang Yi-song, Taipei Times
In May 2015, the city government ordered Farglory to stop construction due to safety concerns. However, in September last year, it gave its permission for Farglory to partially resume construction.
Farglory Group chairman Chao Teng-hsiung (趙藤雄) has been detained since late last month by the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office on suspicion of bribing New Taipei City officials and embezzling funds from Farglory Life Insurance Co.
Former Taiwan Architecture and Building Center CEO Hsu Ming-wen (許銘文) was also summoned for questioning about profiteering, but was freed on bail of NT$500,000.
The center issued a statement last week saying that Hsu’s involvement in the case was his personal affair, and that the center had been impartial in its reviews.
Yo said the center’s reviews were all conducted during Hsu’s tenure, and the first review in 2011 only took two working days to complete.
The Dome’s safety measures should have been reviewed by the ministry itself, but it transferred the case to the center when Yeh Shih-wen (葉世文) was the director-general of the ministry’s Construction and Planning Agency, Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association lawyer Tsai Ya-ying (蔡雅瀅) said.
Yeh has been convicted and jailed for taking bribes from Chao over New Taipei City’s Linkou A7 MRT public housing project.
If the ministry does not want to make a decision before Chao’s case is resolved, it should at least abolish the Dome’s questionable certificate and conduct a new review, Tsai added.
Construction and Planning Agency Deputy Director-General Wang Jung-ching (王榮進) and the agency’s Building Administration Division chief Kao Wen-ting (高文婷) are both members of the center’s board and had worked in the city government before, Yo said, adding that authorities should investigate if they had ever worked to benefit Farglory.
The groups urged the public to boycott Farglory and stop it from exploiting the nation’s land.
At press time, the ministry said it was collecting information and could not respond to the protest.
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