The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday accused Taitung County Commissioner Kuang Li-chen (鄺麗貞) of forging trip reports for her overseas travels.
Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦), director of DPP’s Department of Culture and Information, told a press conference yesterday that Kuang’s husband, Wu Chun-li (吳俊立) — a former Taitung County commissioner and currently a councilor to the Taitung County Government — had gone on a trip to Thailand with county government officials in June last year. Three months later, Kuang led another group on another visit there.
Citing government officials’ public trip reports released by the Cabinet’s Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, Cheng said that “while the names of the delegation members, the schedules and dates differed in the two Thailand trips, the content of the two reports as well as the amount asked for reimbursement were almost identical.”
Kuang only submitted the report so she could apply for reimbursement from public coffers, Cheng said.
The Ministry of Audit’s Taitung branch said yesterday it would look into the matter and deny approval of the reimbursements if her travel report was found to have been fabricated.
Kuang has come under fire from politicians across party lines for taking 10 township heads on a 13-day trip to Europe late last month, despite forecasts that Typhoon Fung-wong was heading for Taiwan and would hit from the east coast.
Kuang has also been accused of wasting public funds on several trips abroad. The frequency of her overseas trips has also raised many eyebrows. DPP legislators said Kuang has spent more than NT$10 million (US$325,000) on overseas trips since she assumed her position a little more than two years ago.
She has also been criticized for turning the county’s promotional brochures into her own portfolio, in which she poses in different outfits.
Following growing criticism from local residents and the public, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) has asked the party’s Taitung branch to look into the matter and send its findings to the committee for further investigation.
A tropical depression east of the Philippines became a tropical storm early yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, less than a week after a typhoon barreled across the nation. The agency issued an advisory at 3:30am stating that the 22nd tropical storm, named Yinxing, of the Pacific typhoon season formed at 2am. As of 8am, the storm was 1,730km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan’s southernmost point, with a 100km radius. It was moving west-northwest at 32kph, with maximum sustained winds of 83kph and gusts of up to 108kph. Based on its current path, the storm is not expected to hit Taiwan, CWA
Residents have called on the Taipei City Government to reconsider its plan to demolish a four-decades-old pedestrian overpass near Daan Forest Park. The 42-year-old concrete and steel structure that serves as an elevated walkway over the intersection of Heping and Xinsheng roads is to be closed on Tuesday in preparation for demolition slated for completion by the end of the month. However, in recent days some local residents have been protesting the planned destruction of the intersection overpass that is rendered more poetically as “sky bridge” in Chinese. “This bridge carries the community’s collective memory,” said a man surnamed Chuang
FATALITIES: The storm claimed at least two lives — a female passenger in a truck that was struck by a falling tree and a man who was hit by a utility pole Workers cleared fallen trees and shop owners swept up debris yesterday after one of the biggest typhoons to hit the nation in decades claimed at least two lives. Typhoon Kong-rey was packing winds of 184kph when it slammed into eastern Taiwan on Thursday, uprooting trees, triggering floods and landslides, and knocking out power as it swept across the nation. A 56-year-old female foreign national died from her injuries after the small truck she was in was struck by a falling tree on Provincial Highway 14A early on Thursday. The second death was reported at 8pm in Taipei on Thursday after a 48-year-old man
A tropical depression east of the Philippines became a tropical storm earlier today, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The 22nd tropical storm, named Yinxing, in this year's Pacific typhoon season formed at 2am, the CWA said. As of 8am, the storm was 1,730km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻) with a 100km radius, it said. It was moving west-northwest at 32kph, with maximum sustained winds of 83kph and gusts of up to 108kph. Based on its current path, the storm is not expected to hit Taiwan, CWA meteorologist Huang En-hung (黃恩宏) said. However, a more accurate forecast would be made on Wednesday, when Yinxing is
RSS