Presidential Office Secretary-General Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) did not deliberately keep Taiwanese diplomatic officers out of the loop about his 2016 visit to Indonesia, nor did he meet with any Indonesian officials as alleged by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) members, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday.
KMT Culture and Communications Committee chairwoman Alicia Wang (王育敏), and KMT Institute of Revolutionary Practice director Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) and deputy director Yu Shu-hui (游淑惠) on Monday said that Su and his nephew, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Su Chen-ching (蘇震清), had tried to profit from state-owned business operations in Indonesia, citing a declassified telegram sent by the Taipei Economic and Trade Office (TETO) in Jakarta to the ministry in 2017.
The KMT members also allege that Su Jia-chyuan, then the legislative speaker, had gone through Yang Luck International Manpower Group president Kao Shou-tao (高壽濤), who allegedly had ties with the Fujian branch of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.
Asked to comment on the accusations at an event in Taipei yesterday, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said that Su Jia-chyuan and the ministry had responded on the issue.
“Accusations must be based on facts, instead of spinning a tale by cherry-picking bits of information,” Tsai added.
Asked if she would ask agencies to investigate official records related to Su Jia-chyuan’s trip, Tsai said that people could refer to the ministry’s previous response on the matter.
Ministry spokesperson Joanne Ou (歐江安) said in a statement on Monday that Su Jia-chyuan did not ask for the ministry’s help during his private trip to Indonesia in September 2016, adding that he did not visit the country in 2017 as the KMT claimed.
Asked to comment on the issue again at a news briefing yesterday, Ou said that his trip in September 2016 was to thank those who had supported Tsai.
Su Jia-chyuan’s office had informed the MOFA that the trip was not an official visit, and that TETO in Jakarta should not arrange any official events or receive him at the airport, Ou said.
He did not consciously keep the Jakarta office in the dark, and the office only met him at the airport, but did not participate in events he scheduled, Ou said.
A MOFA investigation confirmed that Su Jia-chyuan only interacted with local overseas compatriots on the trip and did not meet with local government officials, Ou said.
Representatives of state-owned businesses, when abroad, usually promote communication with the local Taiwan representative office to facilitate affairs, Ou said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS