DPP heavyweight and lawmaker Yen Ching-fu (
Yen Ching-fu and his daughter held a press conference at the Legislative Yuan yesterday morning and complained that several Chinese-language news stories have damaged the younger Yen's name with false allegations.
"For example, look at the China Times Express on Wednesday ? the story was headlined with `Yens questioned over vote-buying' ? it seems to me that the reporter believed that my daughter bought votes and his story also made the public believe that was the case, even though my daughter was not prosecuted for it," Yen said.
PHOTO: FANG PIN-CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES
"Is that fair?"
"I must reiterate: My daughter did not buy votes. She won the election through her own hard work during her first term at the city council."
Yen Sheng-kuan and her father were suspected of buying votes by treating her voters to free dinner while she was running for re-election for the Taipei City councilor election last Saturday. The Taipei District Prosecutors' Office summoned Yen Sheng-kuan on Wednesday for clarification.
Yen Ching-fu told reporters on Wednesday that he was the organizer of the dinner party and all the tickets were for sale since they needed money for the campaign.
He said that he held the campaign dinner party for his daughter on Sept. 29 and prepared a total amount of 2,000 tickets to sell to voters.
"We earned a total amount of NT$1.4 million from the sale of these tickets. However, we also spent NT$1.2 million on arranging the dinner party. Honestly, we did not earn much from it," he said.
"Also, I do not understand how a legal campaign dinner party like this could be seen as an attempt to buy votes."
Yen also said that he would consider working with his colleagues to pass legislation that would prohibit all campaign dinner parties.
"Since prosecutors believe that a legal campaign dinner party could mean that candidates are buying votes, why don't we just simply prohibit these kinds of activities in the future so that nobody would be bothered by such false accusations again?" he added.
His daughter, who has a master's degree in politics from George Washington University, was elected to a second term as city councilor last Saturday by a winning margin of 11,967 votes. She ran in Taipei's fifth constituency, which covers the Chungcheng and Wanhua districts.
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) and Chunghwa Telecom yesterday confirmed that an international undersea cable near Keelung Harbor had been cut by a Chinese ship, the Shunxin-39, a freighter registered in Cameroon. Chunghwa Telecom said the cable had its own backup equipment, and the incident would not affect telecommunications within Taiwan. The CGA said it dispatched a ship under its first fleet after receiving word of the incident and located the Shunxin-39 7 nautical miles (13km) north of Yehliu (野柳) at about 4:40pm on Friday. The CGA demanded that the Shunxin-39 return to seas closer to Keelung Harbor for investigation over the
National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology (NKUST) yesterday promised it would increase oversight of use of Chinese in course materials, following a social media outcry over instances of simplified Chinese characters being used, including in a final exam. People on Threads wrote that simplified Chinese characters were used on a final exam and in a textbook for a translation course at the university, while the business card of a professor bore the words: “Taiwan Province, China.” Photographs of the exam, the textbook and the business card were posted with the comments. NKUST said that other members of the faculty did not see
The Taipei City Government yesterday said contractors organizing its New Year’s Eve celebrations would be held responsible after a jumbo screen played a Beijing-ran television channel near the event’s end. An image showing China Central Television (CCTV) Channel 3 being displayed was posted on the social media platform Threads, sparking an outcry on the Internet over Beijing’s alleged political infiltration of the municipal government. A Taipei Department of Information and Tourism spokesman said event workers had made a “grave mistake” and that the Television Broadcasts Satellite (TVBS) group had the contract to operate the screens. The city would apply contractual penalties on TVBS
A new board game set against the backdrop of armed conflict around Taiwan is to be released next month, amid renewed threats from Beijing, inviting players to participate in an imaginary Chinese invasion 20 years from now. China has ramped up military activity close to Taiwan in the past few years, including massing naval forces around the nation. The game, titled 2045, tasks players with navigating the troubles of war using colorful action cards and role-playing as characters involved in operations 10 days before a fictional Chinese invasion of Taiwan. That includes members of the armed forces, Chinese sleeper agents and pro-China politicians
RSS