The Hong Kong consultancy that produced a report that prompted President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to order a three-month judicial and governmental review of corruption earlier this week said yesterday the scores should not be interpreted as meaning Taiwan is more corrupt than China.
Bob Broadfoot, managing director of Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC), also said the corruption index cited by Ma included perceptions both of the nation’s leadership and the opposition leadership.
“The score where Taiwan scores worse than China is on perceptions [of foreign executives] regarding the national leadership,” Broadfoot wrote yesterday in an e-mail to the Taipei Times. “The interpretation, therefore, should not be that corruption is worse in one place than the other, but that executives in Taiwan have a less favorable view of the island’s national-level political leaders (including opposition heads) when it comes to corruption than executives working in the Mainland view China’s national-level leaders.”
Broadfoot also said the index did not include corruption in the police, judiciary, financial sector or civil service, in which perceptions in Taiwan were better than in China.
On Wednesday, Ma surprised reporters by presiding over a press conference at which he expressed strong “distress” and said the nation’s achievements in democracy and its core values had been “tarnished.”
“Taiwan’s degree of corruption was unexpectedly worse than that of mainland China,” Ma said.
Ma said most of the corruption had occurred under the former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration and vowed to address the problem.
He ordered the government and judiciary to launch a probe into “major” corruption cases and produce a report within three months detailing the cases and proposing measures to fight corruption.
A day later, the legislature’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee tasked Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) with creating an anti-graft commission, with Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Chiu Yi (邱毅) saying the president had declared war on corruption. Chiu called on the state public prosecutor-general to step down to allow for faster proceedings against former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).
Minister of Justice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰) said she was as distressed as the president about corruption in the former administration and that her ministry was hard at work on the special probe ordered by Ma.
The Political and Economic Risk Consultancy’s annual report surveyed more than 1,700 foreign business executives in 16 countries.
In the category of perceptions of corruption among the nation’s leadership, Taiwan scored 6.47 on a scale of zero to 10, while China scored 6.16.
On why perceptions of central leadership corruption could be more favorable in China, Broadfoot said: “The problem of corruption [in China] is perceived to be more serious at the local and provincial level. National level leaders are considered ‘cleaner.’ In Taiwan this is not the case.”
He speculated that frequent allegations of corruption in Taiwan by politicians could be reflected in the survey results.
“It could well be that rival politicians in Taiwan are so busy calling each other corrupt that they are responsible for creating the impression that our survey reflects,” Broadfoot said.
Super Typhoon Kong-rey is the largest cyclone to impact Taiwan in 27 years, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said today. Kong-rey’s radius of maximum wind (RMW) — the distance between the center of a cyclone and its band of strongest winds — has expanded to 320km, CWA forecaster Chang Chun-yao (張竣堯) said. The last time a typhoon of comparable strength with an RMW larger than 300km made landfall in Taiwan was Typhoon Herb in 1996, he said. Herb made landfall between Keelung and Suao (蘇澳) in Yilan County with an RMW of 350km, Chang said. The weather station in Alishan (阿里山) recorded 1.09m of
NO WORK, CLASS: President William Lai urged people in the eastern, southern and northern parts of the country to be on alert, with Typhoon Kong-rey approaching Typhoon Kong-rey is expected to make landfall on Taiwan’s east coast today, with work and classes canceled nationwide. Packing gusts of nearly 300kph, the storm yesterday intensified into a typhoon and was expected to gain even more strength before hitting Taitung County, the US Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center said. The storm is forecast to cross Taiwan’s south, enter the Taiwan Strait and head toward China, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The CWA labeled the storm a “strong typhoon,” the most powerful on its scale. Up to 1.2m of rainfall was expected in mountainous areas of eastern Taiwan and destructive winds are likely
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday at 5:30pm issued a sea warning for Typhoon Kong-rey as the storm drew closer to the east coast. As of 8pm yesterday, the storm was 670km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻) and traveling northwest at 12kph to 16kph. It was packing maximum sustained winds of 162kph and gusts of up to 198kph, the CWA said. A land warning might be issued this morning for the storm, which is expected to have the strongest impact on Taiwan from tonight to early Friday morning, the agency said. Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) and Green Island (綠島) canceled classes and work
KONG-REY: A woman was killed in a vehicle hit by a tree, while 205 people were injured as the storm moved across the nation and entered the Taiwan Strait Typhoon Kong-rey slammed into Taiwan yesterday as one of the biggest storms to hit the nation in decades, whipping up 10m waves, triggering floods and claiming at least one life. Kong-rey made landfall in Taitung County’s Chenggong Township (成功) at 1:40pm, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The typhoon — the first in Taiwan’s history to make landfall after mid-October — was moving north-northwest at 21kph when it hit land, CWA data showed. The fast-moving storm was packing maximum sustained winds of 184kph, with gusts of up to 227kph, CWA data showed. It was the same strength as Typhoon Gaemi, which was the most
RSS