The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday criticized Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁), the Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate for Kaohsiung mayor, for not signing an anti-corruption agreement, saying that it was because several members on his campaign team have been implicated in corruption cases.
The KMT told a news conference that Kaohsiung City Councilor Jane Lee (李眉蓁), the KMT’s candidate for Kaohsiung mayor, brought up the idea of signing an anti-corruption agreement before Saturday’s by-election in an effort to prevent corruption as was seen when the DPP held the city’s mayoral seat.
The conference was held by KMT Deputy Secretary-General Hsieh Lung-chieh (謝龍介), who heads Lee’s campaign spokesperson team; KMT Culture and Communications Committee chairwoman Alicia Wang (王育敏); and Kaohsiung Information Bureau Director-General Cheng Chao-hsin (鄭照新), one of Lee’s campaign spokespeople.
While Lee has vowed to govern the city with integrity if elected, Chen has refused to sign the agreement, possibly because “he does not have the courage to challenge the DPP’s systematic structure of complicity in bribery and corruption,” the KMT said.
The DPP has become “a government that maps out things,” reaping illicit benefits by way of political maneuvering, the KMT said.
For example, it said that Yu Cheng-hsien (余政憲), who heads Chen’s campaign office, was implicated in a bribery case regarding the construction of the Nangang Exhibition Hall in 2008; Kang Yu-cheng (康裕成), Chen’s chief executive, was found guilty of forging documents to request money for an assistant in 2015; and her husband allegedly defrauded the National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) in 2006.
Lin Chin-hsing (林進興), the office’s deputy chairperson, was found guilty of defrauding the NHIA in 2008, while Lin Tai-hua (林岱樺), another deputy chairperson at the office, allegedly used her role as a legislator in 2017 to recommend a person to the state-owned Chinese Petroleum Corp (CPC), which afterward hired them, the KMT said.
DPP Kaohsiung City Councilor Lin Chih-hung (林智鴻), a spokesperson for Chen’s campaign, said the by-election should come down to debates about policies, and that the team would not respond to political manipulation orchestrated by their opponents.
Kaohsiung has been at the forefront of Taiwan’s democratic development, so the by-election should be a joyful event for the citizens, as they can exercise their democratic right to elect a new mayor, Lin Chih-hung said.
However, the KMT has turned the election into a “mudslinging competition” that is not welcomed by Kaohsiung citizens, he added.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,