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.
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
‘SIGN OF DANGER’: Beijing has never directly named Taiwanese leaders before, so China is saying that its actions are aimed at the DPP, a foundation official said National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) yesterday accused Beijing of spreading propaganda, saying that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had singled out President William Lai (賴清德) in his meeting with US President Joe Biden when talking about those whose “true nature” seek Taiwanese independence. The Biden-Xi meeting took place on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Peru on Saturday. “If the US cares about maintaining peace across the Taiwan Strait, it is crucial that it sees clearly the true nature of Lai and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in seeking Taiwanese independence, handles the Taiwan question with extra
RSS