Taipei prosecutors this week will begin interviewing Presidential Office officials over the alleged embezzlement.
"The officials will be interviewed as witnesses starting this week," Eric Chen (
The Chinese-language United Daily News yesterday reported that a prosecutorial source said that investigators and the Ministry of Audit had discovered that around NT$15 million (US$458,100) in reimbursements for Pacific Sogo Department Store vouchers had been requested.
The report said the NT$15 million in vouchers were submitted for reimbursement from 2003 to last year.
The paper said that since first lady Wu Shu-jen (
Chen declined to comment on the news report.
Ministry of Audit Spokesman Wang Yung-hsing (王永興) yesterday told the press that the ministry had handed over documents related to the Presidential Office's reimbursement of expenditures from a "special allowance" fund to prosecutors, and the ministry would no longer comment on the matter.
The Ministry of Audit last week called for an investigation into allegations of embezzlement at the Presidential Office, saying it had received insufficient information to verify the legality of NT$48 million in expenditures from a secret Presidential Office slush fund.
Wang had said that documents related to the Presidential Office's reimbursement of expenditures from a "special allowance" fund last year contained irregularities.
The ministry had said that about 76.76 percent of the expenditures covered by the fund -- NT$48 million in total -- had not been reimbursed in conformity with the regulations.
According to the ministry's investigation, NT$47.9 million out of NT$48 million was spent last year, among which receipts for NT$24 million were classified and receipts for another NT$12.8 million were deemed unqualified for reimbursement.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chiu Yi (
Those receipts were issued by the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Taipei, the Ambassador Hotel and Sogo Department Store, among others, Chiu alleged.
"We did find that some copies of the receipts Legislator Chiu provided to us had been used to reimburse expenditures from the fund, but we can't make public the amount, value or people who requested reimbursement," Wang said yesterday.
Police have issued warnings against traveling to Cambodia or Thailand when others have paid for the travel fare in light of increasing cases of teenagers, middle-aged and elderly people being tricked into traveling to these countries and then being held for ransom. Recounting their ordeal, one victim on Monday said she was asked by a friend to visit Thailand and help set up a bank account there, for which they would be paid NT$70,000 to NT$100,000 (US$2,136 to US$3,051). The victim said she had not found it strange that her friend was not coming along on the trip, adding that when she
TRAGEDY: An expert said that the incident was uncommon as the chance of a ground crew member being sucked into an IDF engine was ‘minuscule’ A master sergeant yesterday morning died after she was sucked into an engine during a routine inspection of a fighter jet at an air base in Taichung, the Air Force Command Headquarters said. The officer, surnamed Hu (胡), was conducting final landing checks at Ching Chuan Kang (清泉崗) Air Base when she was pulled into the jet’s engine for unknown reasons, the air force said in a news release. She was transported to a hospital for emergency treatment, but could not be revived, it said. The air force expressed its deepest sympathies over the incident, and vowed to work with authorities as they
A tourist who was struck and injured by a train in a scenic area of New Taipei City’s Pingsi District (平溪) on Monday might be fined for trespassing on the tracks, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday. The New Taipei City Fire Department said it received a call at 4:37pm on Monday about an incident in Shifen (十分), a tourist destination on the Pingsi Railway Line. After arriving on the scene, paramedics treated a woman in her 30s for a 3cm to 5cm laceration on her head, the department said. She was taken to a hospital in Keelung, it said. Surveillance footage from a
INFRASTRUCTURE: Work on the second segment, from Kaohsiung to Pingtung, is expected to begin in 2028 and be completed by 2039, the railway bureau said Planned high-speed rail (HSR) extensions would blanket Taiwan proper in four 90-minute commute blocs to facilitate regional economic and livelihood integration, Railway Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Cheng-chun (楊正君) said in an interview published yesterday. A project to extend the high-speed rail from Zuoying Station in Kaohsiung to Pingtung County’s Lioukuaicuo Township (六塊厝) is the first part of the bureau’s greater plan to expand rail coverage, he told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). The bureau’s long-term plan is to build a loop to circle Taiwan proper that would consist of four sections running from Taipei to Hualien, Hualien to
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