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.
Typhoon Usagi yesterday had weakened into a tropical storm, but a land warning issued by the Central Weather Administration (CWA) was still in effect in four areas in southern Taiwan. As of 5pm yesterday, Tropical Storm Usagi was over waters 120km south-southwest of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), the southernmost tip of Taiwan proper, and was moving north at 9kph, CWA data showed. The storm was expected to veer northeast later yesterday. It had maximum sustained winds of 101kph, with gusts of up to 126kph, the data showed. The CWA urged residents of Kaohsiung, Pingtung County, Taitung County and the Hengchun Peninsula (恆春) to remain alert to
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