Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) member and political pundit Luo You-zhi (羅友志) on Monday accused New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) of trying to bribe him in exchange for not seeking the party’s nomination in the 2014 local elections.
Luo wrote on Facebook that he entered the KMT’s primary for a councilor seat in New Taipei City’s seventh electoral district in 2014, when Hou was deputy mayor.
“Hou called me for a meeting. He told me: ‘Brother, I am in charge of candidate nomination [for the city]. You should not run in this district... You should run in Sijhih District (汐止). We will pay you NT$5 million [US$163,967 at the current exchange rate],” Luo wrote.
Photo: Tien Yu-hua, Taipei Times
“I learned that if I ran as a KMT candidate, my support base would have affected another candidate favored by the party’s top officials, and it would have disrupted the KMT’s nomination and election plans for New Taipei City,” he added.
Luo said he did not accept Hou’s offer and the KMT did not nominate him.
He eventually ran as an independent, but lost.
Luo accused Hou of conducting so inn a teng (搓圓仔湯, “kneading to make rice ball soup”), a Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) term that often refers to political schemes involving coaxing a candidate to drop out of a race by offering money.
“Taiwan guarantees free speech and is also a democratic country,” Hou said yesterday.
New Taipei City Councilor Ho Po-wen (何博文) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) filed a judicial complaint regarding Luo’s accusations, while a group of DPP lawmakers asked prosecutors to investigate the claim.
Hou has been accused of “seriously harming our democratic system,” Ho said.
“We are concerned, because Hou is seeking the KMT’s presidential nomimation. Will he make secret deals to give up the interests of Taiwanese and trade away our nation’s future?” Ho asked.
Ho pointed to Article 97 of the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法), which states: “Anyone who makes a candidate or a person qualified for a candidate agree to abandon the campaign or to perform certain campaign activities by asking for expected promises or delivering bribes or other undue benefits” could be punished with a prison sentence of three to 10 years and a fine of up to NT$20 million.
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