No Matter How Pompous the Ambitions on the Part of the Powers that Be, the Public Will End Up Footing the Bill

  No Matter How Pompous the Ambitions on the Part of the Powers that Be, the Public Will End Up Footing the Bill

United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

November 27, 2017

 Translation of an Excerpt

The Navy’s minesweeper case has run aground, and the nature of the matter has not been clearly defined. The Coast Guard jumped ahead, declaring on its own initiative the termination of the contract with Ching Fu Shipbuilding Co. to build patrol boats and seeking compensation of NT$1.28 billion. The move on the part of the Coast Guard to terminate the contract seems to foretell that the minesweepers case will end with the same fate. If this should come to pass, it will not only be a big blow to the policy of "locally manufacturing navy ships," touted by the preceding and incumbent presidents, but will also result in a loss of over NT$10 billion of public money.

The contract between the Coast Guard and Ching Fu is to build 28 100-ton class patrol boats, worth a total of NT$3.75 billion. To date, the Coast Guard has received and accepted 13 vessels, with the remaining 15 being behind schedule. After several attempts to ask the shipbuilder to speed up production to no avail, the Coast Guard had to declare the termination of the contract, while the minesweepers project’s total budget is ten times that of the Coast Guard’s patrol boat budget, reaching as high as NT$35.2 billion, to build 6 minesweepers.

Today, if this case ends in a termination of the contract, plus a syndicated loan for a National Museum of Marine Science and Technology, state-owned banks are estimated to suffer losses of as high as NT$14.9 billion. This will be picked up by the consortium of state banks, but tantamount to taxpayers’ losses. For this reason, no matter how pompous the ambitions that the powers that be have bragged about, it will end with the government "picking up the bill with public money."

We want to remind everyone that while exposing a scandal is important, if the government is unable to learn a lesson from the scandal and then seeks to improve its public tender, supervision and system implementation, or even deliberately utilizes the scandal to engage in political maneuverings, the end result will an exercise in futility. 

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