A pundit and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) spokesman yesterday said that Sunday’s election of city and county council speakers were tainted by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) ties to organized crime.
Among the six major cities, in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan and Taichung, councilors elected KMT members as speakers and deputy speakers shortly after their inaugurations.
Only councils in Tainan and Kaohsiung leaned toward the DPP for those positions.
Photo: Lee Hui-chou, Taipei Times
Kaohsiung City Councilor Tseng Chun-chieh (曾俊傑) on Saturday quit the KMT due to intra-party disputes, saying he would sit as an independent and courted DPP Kaohsiung City Councilor Kang Yu-cheng (康裕成) for needed votes for the deputy speaker’s job.
From Sunday’s selection of speaker’s positions, the KMT holds 15 council speaker offices while the DPP holds four, and three speakers hold no party affiliation. Fifteen speakers are incumbents, while seven are newly elected.
The KMT holds 14 deputy speaker positions, while the DPP has two and the People First Party has one. Five deputy speakers are without party affiliation.
Author and political pundit Wang Hao (汪浩) said that nearly every KMT speaker and deputy speaker with alleged ties to organized crime were re-elected to their positions.
Those include KMT members in Taipei, Taichung, Taoyuan, Hsinchu City, Nantou County and Yunlin County, Wang said.
“Taipei City Council Deputy Speaker Yeh Lin-chuan (葉林傳) and Taichung Coucil Deputy Speaker Yen Li-min (顏莉敏) are members of prominent local families connected to gang members with criminal convictions,” Wang said.
A number of KMT members in top city and council positions have been convicted of assault, intimidation, and gang-related crime, he added.
“Hsinchu City Deputy Speaker Hsu Hsiu-juei (許修睿) was a gangster leading a local chapter of the Four Seas Gang. Hsu served a six-month sentence for blackmail and extortion while colluding with other gangsters in a garbage landfill business in 1999, and also sentenced to a suspended one-year term for gang-related criminal activities in 2004,” Wang said.
Nantou County Council Speaker Ho Sheng-feng (何勝豐) and Deputy Speaker Pan Yi-chuan (潘一全), both of the KMT, have connections with gang members, he said.
Ho was charged with blackmail, vote-buying, arson and other offenses, while Pan had been arrested for uttering threats against local elected officials in 1999 and violent intimidation in 2000, in efforts to obtain a construction contract relating to earthquake rebuilding programs, Wang said.
“KMT Taoyuan City Council Speaker Chiu Yi-sheng (邱奕勝) was found guilty of corruption in 2014, which was upheld on appeal, and sentenced to a nine-year term,” he said.
“Lee Hsiao-chung (李曉鐘) was convicted of buying votes during a 1994 election for top Taoyuan council offices, receiving a suspended sentence of one year,” Wang said.
The often fierce contests for top council jobs are in pursuit of the speaker’s power on decisionmaking, which includes approval of local construction projects and allocation of public funds, he said.
The annual central government transfer of NT$1 trillion (US$32.56 billion), to local city and county councils for public projects is a “pig trough” that is often used for shady deals and cronyism, Wang said.
DPP spokesman Hsieh Tzu-han (謝子涵) yesterday addressed the issue in a statement.
“Using the KMT’s majority in most local councils, the party had enough success to elect speakers and deputy speakers tainted by organized crime connections,” Hsieh said. “This shows that the party is deceiving the public on its promise to remove gangsters within its ranks.”
The DPP recently passed a resolution to prohibit anyone with criminal convictions or ties to organized crime from running as candidates.
“KMT officials at that time claimed they have much stronger regulations to remove gangsters, but Sunday’s council votes showed the contrary,” Hsieh said.
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
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS