Pork-barrel graft
While the arrest of current ROC president 陳水扁 Chen Shui-Bian’s son-in-law 趙建銘 Chao Chien-ming is dominating the headlines, a second, more confusing scandal has come out involving the hapless, scandal-plagued 高速鐵路即將通車 Taiwan High Speed Rail project.
From what I can make out, the high-speed rail will pass through the Souther Taiwan Science Park and make a lot of noise. The Ministry of Transportation and Communication and the National Science Council planned to reduce the noise down to 48 decibels.
This is where things start to get strange. On Tuesday May 25, 廖本煙Laio Pen-yen of the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU), a sometime DPP ally, claimed that the the noise-dampening project was $2.5 billion over market cost.
謝清志 Hsieh Ching-chih, vice chairman of the National Science Council, shot back that the area noise level without the train was already 50 decibels, meaning that the noise dampening wall was a total waste of money. He immediately resigned and was then arrested on Wednesday.
On Thursday, the Public Construction Commission made a ruling in response to multiple complaints and a lawsuit by the losing bidder on the contract for the this job. The commission ruled that the process of selecting a contractor was illegal, but nothing illegal happened in the process. The fact that the contractor could not do the impossible (reduce the noise of the entire neighborhood) meant the contract should never have been awarded.
So what can we conclude from this anticlimactic episode? The Taipei Times’ take on the story is on the myopic side, which puts a conveniently positive spin on the confusion. Clearly Hsieh saw an opportunity for a pork-barrel project, and conveniently threw the job to a firm which did not submit the most competitive proposal. That’s why he’s still in jail - in the end this is an old-fashioned case of bribery.
From what I can make out, the high-speed rail will pass through the Souther Taiwan Science Park and make a lot of noise. The Ministry of Transportation and Communication and the National Science Council planned to reduce the noise down to 48 decibels.
This is where things start to get strange. On Tuesday May 25, 廖本煙Laio Pen-yen of the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU), a sometime DPP ally, claimed that the the noise-dampening project was $2.5 billion over market cost.
謝清志 Hsieh Ching-chih, vice chairman of the National Science Council, shot back that the area noise level without the train was already 50 decibels, meaning that the noise dampening wall was a total waste of money. He immediately resigned and was then arrested on Wednesday.
On Thursday, the Public Construction Commission made a ruling in response to multiple complaints and a lawsuit by the losing bidder on the contract for the this job. The commission ruled that the process of selecting a contractor was illegal, but nothing illegal happened in the process. The fact that the contractor could not do the impossible (reduce the noise of the entire neighborhood) meant the contract should never have been awarded.
So what can we conclude from this anticlimactic episode? The Taipei Times’ take on the story is on the myopic side, which puts a conveniently positive spin on the confusion. Clearly Hsieh saw an opportunity for a pork-barrel project, and conveniently threw the job to a firm which did not submit the most competitive proposal. That’s why he’s still in jail - in the end this is an old-fashioned case of bribery.
posted by Taiwan's Other Side at 10:22 PM
1 Comments:
There's apparently a website devoted to releasing this guy and drumming up support in the US for his release:
http://www.supportching.com/
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home