Vietnam-based Dai Hanh Phuc Co exported 43,000 tonnes of animal feed-grade oil to Taiwan over the past three years, the trading company’s manager said on Saturday, opening up the possibility that more domestic firms are involved in the latest cooking oil scare than previously thought.
The manager runs Dai Hanh Phuc with her Taiwanese partner, Yang Chen-yi (楊振益), who was detained by local authorities for allegedly supplying Ting Hsin International Group (頂新集團) with the animal feed-grade oil the Taiwanese conglomerate used to produce oil products sold for human use.
The manager said the Vietnamese firm shipped 6 million kilograms of edible cooking oil and 43 million kilograms of animal feed-grade oil to Taiwan from July 2011 to July of this year.
She also told Taiwanese officials that Dai Hanh Phuc has not been involved in the distribution of cooking oil since July.
Although no mutual judicial assistance accord exists between Taipei and Hanoi, Taiwanese diplomats said their talks with the Vietnam-based company could help serve as “testimony” for Taiwanese authorities investigating the case.
However, Dai Hanh Phuc’s motivation for issuing a statement that it is no longer distributing cooking oil is suspicious and needs to be investigated, local officials said.
If Dai Hanh Phuc exported the animal feed-grade oil to Taiwan as fit for human consumption, it would have had to forge documents to comply with Vietnamese law, local officials said.
If Dai Hanh Phuc’s claim that it supplied such a massive amount of animal feed-grade oil to Taiwanese companies to produce cooking oil is true — as Ting Hsin was found to have done — more businesses could be implicated in the tainted oil scandal than have been identified.
The manager was called in by Taiwan’s representative office in Vietnam to clarify the details surrounding the cooking oil scare that erupted earlier this month — the third of its kind in a year — all of which have involved Ting Hsin.
Ting Hsin, one of the nation’s largest food companies, is at the heart of the scandal, after it was been found to have used recycled waste oil and oil intended for animal use from Dai Hanh Phuc in its cooking oil products.
Ting Hsin senior executive Wei Ying-chun (魏應充), who resigned as chairman of Ting Hsin subsidiary Wei Chuan Foods Corp (味全食品工業) in the wake of the latest scandal, has been taken into custody for his suspected role in the incident.
Yang and four executives at Ting Hsin and its subsidiaries have also been remanded into custody.
EXPRESSING GRATITUDE: Without its Taiwanese partners which are ‘working around the clock,’ Nvidia could not meet AI demand, CEO Jensen Huang said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and US-based artificial intelligence (AI) chip designer Nvidia Corp have partnered with each other on silicon photonics development, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said. Speaking with reporters after he met with TSMC chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家) in Taipei on Friday, Huang said his company was working with the world’s largest contract chipmaker on silicon photonics, but admitted it was unlikely for the cooperation to yield results any time soon, and both sides would need several years to achieve concrete outcomes. To have a stake in the silicon photonics supply chain, TSMC and
‘DETERRENT’: US national security adviser-designate Mike Waltz said that he wants to speed up deliveries of weapons purchased by Taiwan to deter threats from China US president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, affirmed his commitment to peace in the Taiwan Strait during his confirmation hearing in Washington on Tuesday. Hegseth called China “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to US national security” and said that he would aim to limit Beijing’s expansion in the Indo-Pacific region, Voice of America reported. He would also adhere to long-standing policies to prevent miscalculations, Hegseth added. The US Senate Armed Services Committee hearing was the first for a nominee of Trump’s incoming Cabinet, and questions mostly focused on whether he was fit for the
IDENTITY: Compared with other platforms, TikTok’s algorithm pushes a ‘disproportionately high ratio’ of pro-China content, a study has found Young Taiwanese are increasingly consuming Chinese content on TikTok, which is changing their views on identity and making them less resistant toward China, researchers and politicians were cited as saying by foreign media. Asked to suggest the best survival strategy for a small country facing a powerful neighbor, students at National Chia-Yi Girls’ Senior High School said “Taiwan must do everything to avoid provoking China into attacking it,” the Financial Times wrote on Friday. Young Taiwanese between the ages of 20 and 24 in the past were the group who most strongly espoused a Taiwanese identity, but that is no longer
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake and several aftershocks battered southern Taiwan early this morning, causing houses and roads to collapse and leaving dozens injured and 50 people isolated in their village. A total of 26 people were reported injured and sent to hospitals due to the earthquake as of late this morning, according to the latest Ministry of Health and Welfare figures. In Sising Village (西興) of Chiayi County's Dapu Township (大埔), the location of the quake's epicenter, severe damage was seen and roads entering the village were blocked, isolating about 50 villagers. Another eight people who were originally trapped inside buildings in Tainan
RSS