Tainan City Councilor Hsieh Lung-chieh (謝龍介) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday called the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) an “autocracy,” after two of his KMT colleagues were summoned by prosecutors for allegedly spreading rumors about Triple Stimulus Vouchers.
Tainan City councilors Wang Chia-chen (王家貞) and Lee Chung-tsen (李中岑) on Monday said that they and their assistants were late last month summoned by the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office for questioning on a charge of breaching the Social Order Maintenance Act (社會秩序維護法), after they held a news conference on July 20 alleging that there had been counterfeit vouchers circulating.
A business owner tried to cash in fake vouchers at a bank, which confiscated the bogus vouchers, they told the news conference.
Photo: Wang Chu-hsiu, Taipei Times
However, the duo’s claims were labeled as fake news by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, as business owners were not allowed to cash in the vouchers before July 23.
The DPP attempted to curtail their freedom of speech by striking fear into them, Wang and Lee told another news conference on Monday, adding that they were only commenting on a complaint that they had received.
Separately yesterday, when asked to comment on the investigation into the incident, Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) said that when they spread disinformation, Wang and Lee, as public figures, caused people to worry and “sent ripples across society.”
The two were summoned for questioning after he asked law enforcement agencies to rigorously investigate the incident, which was only proper, he said.
However, Su’s remarks drew a heated response from Hsieh, who said that the administration’s handling of the case showed the DPP’s autocratic nature.
In scrutinizing the government, Wang and Su were only doing their jobs, Hsieh said, adding that they did not spread rumors, but turned the alleged counterfeit vouchers over to prosecutors as evidence.
Su forcibly intervened in the judicial system and pressured prosecutors to launch an investigation, disregarding the neutrality of the judiciary, Hsieh said.
They would not be silenced, he said, vowing to overthrow Su, which would be “only proper.”
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
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