More than 10 elementary-school principals from the New Taipei City (新北市) area are being investigated for allegedly accepting kickbacks from school lunch dealers, the Banciao District Prosecutors’ Office said yesterday.
The office has arraigned six school principals for questioning and searched several elementary schools yesterday — including three schools in Banciao (板橋), two in Sinjhuang (新莊), two in Lujhou (蘆洲), and one each in Sansia (三峽) and Shulin (樹林).
A preliminary investigation showed that the lunch dealers might have bribed the school principals to receive a better evaluation grade, enabling them to make a bid for supplying school lunches, prosecutors said.
Schools usually hold bids for lunchbox suppliers once every semester. To gain an edge, some dealers would add NT$3 to NT$5 per lunchbox as a bribe for school principals, prosecutors said, adding that some school heads were receiving up to NT$200,000 to NT$300,000 a semester.
Ten school lunch dealers, which supply more than 80 to 90 percent of the city’s elementary school lunches, were also searched yesterday, they said.
Secondary arraignments targeting members of school committees that evaluate these lunches will be held today, they added.
The prosecution has preliminarily excluded other administrative-level personnel at the schools from the investigation, saying school principals are the primary focus at the moment.
New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) said he was sorry to hear about the corruption allegations, vowing that no matter where the money trail leads to, he would track it to the very end.
New Taipei City Deputy Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) said that the issue first came to light in May and the city’s Anti-Corruption Department was asked to look into the matter.
The department found several incidents of principals accepting bribes, or problems with the evaluation committee members, Hou said.
The information was forwarded to the Banciao District Prosecutors’ Office for further investigation, he added.
New Taipei City’s Parents’ Association chairman Wan Chin-yi (王欽益) said he was shocked and also angry on hearing the news, adding that he hoped it was only an error on the part of some schools’ bidding process.
Additional reporting by Tseng Te-feng
Translated by Jake Chung, Staff writer
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
Death row inmate Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱), who was convicted for the double murder of his former girlfriend and her mother, is to be executed at the Taipei Detention Center tonight, the Ministry of Justice announced. Huang, who was a military conscript at the time, was convicted for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, surnamed Wang (王), and the murder of her mother, after breaking into their home on Oct. 1, 2013. Prosecutors cited anger over the breakup and a dispute about money as the motives behind the double homicide. This is the first time that Minister of Justice Cheng Ming-chien (鄭銘謙) has
SECURITY: To protect the nation’s Internet cables, the navy should use buoys marking waters within 50m of them as a restricted zone, a former navy squadron commander said A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed. Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year. Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of
TRANSPORT CONVENIENCE: The new ticket gates would accept a variety of mobile payment methods, and buses would be installed with QR code readers for ease of use New ticketing gates for the Taipei metro system are expected to begin service in October, allowing users to swipe with cellphones and select credit cards partnered with Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), the company said on Tuesday. TRTC said its gates in use are experiencing difficulty due to their age, as they were first installed in 2007. Maintenance is increasingly expensive and challenging as the manufacturing of components is halted or becoming harder to find, the company said. Currently, the gates only accept EasyCard, iPass and electronic icash tickets, or one-time-use tickets purchased at kiosks, the company said. Since 2023, the company said it
RSS