On Monday, Ho was to be released on NT$200,000 bail, but she told prosecutors that she could not pay. The investigation is “political persecution,” Ho said, adding that the tour was unrelated to the Jan. 11 elections. “It was not vote-buying.”The 16 tour participants were questioned and released on Monday, without bail. This indicated that the tour was meant to garner votes for the CUPP and Ho, they added. Born in China’s Hunan Province, Ho in 1996 married her Taiwanese husband and came to live in Taiwan.

“Bankers are now in demand, as local governments are increasingly exposed to financial risks,” said Feng Chucheng, a partner at Plenum, an independent research platform in Hong Kong. “These ex-bankers and regulators are given the task of preventing and mitigating major financial risks,” he said. “We need to be well-prepared with contingency plans,” Xinhua news agency said after a major annual economic meeting headed by Xi this month. Xi started to stress the importance of financial expertise and to elevate the status of executives in 2017. “Political cadres, especially the senior ones, must work hard to learn financial knowledge and be familiar with financial sectors,” Xi said in a national meeting on financial affairs.

By Chen Cheng-hui / Staff reporterConstruction loans grew for an eighth straight month to a record NT$2.06 trillion (US$68.21 billion) last month, data released by the central bank on Wednesday showed. Construction loans are indicative of the construction sector’s attitude toward the real-estate market, which fell to a low of NT$1.61 billion in June 2016 after the government introduced a series of policies to rein in the market. Demand for industrial land has been on the rise throughout the year and companies’ expenditure on industrial-related construction licenses could hit the highest in five years this year. “Spending on factory, industrial and storage construction licenses also increased gradually since hitting a trough in 2016,” she said. “The bank will keep a watchful eye on risk management in financial institutions associated with real-estate lending so as to safeguard financial stability,” the central bank said in a statement released after the board meeting that day.

BloombergBoeing Co said that another high-ranking executive working on the company’s response to the 737 MAX crisis is to step down. Luttig, the company’s former general counsel, was reassigned in May to advise Muilenburg and the board of directors on legal matters related to two deadly MAX crashes. Luttig’s departure adds to the management turmoil at Boeing as the nine-month grounding of the firm’s best-selling jet drags on. The messages between Boeing employees paint a “very disturbing picture,” according to an aide to the US House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. The staff of the House committee are still reviewing the messages and did not provide detailed descriptions of what they contain.

More than 4,700 units of fuel rods remain inside the three melted reactors, and two other reactors that survived the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The water keeps growing by 170 tonnes daily, because it is used to cool the melted fuel. Removal of an estimated 880 tonnes of molten fuel from the plant’s three melted reactors is an unprecedented challenge. Japan has yet to develop a plan to dispose of the highly radioactive melted fuel and other debris that came out of the reactors. More than 10,000 workers are needed annually in the coming years, with about one-third assigned to do work related to the radioactive water.

By Natasha Li / Staff reporterThe Investment Commission yesterday approved Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten Inc’s NT$1.2 billion (US$39.73 million) investment in the Lamigo Monkeys through its Singaporean branch Rakuten Asia Pte, making it the nation’s first professional baseball team owned by a foreign firm. Lamigo, formerly run by Kaohsiung-based shoe manufacturer La New Corp (老牛皮國際), announced the sale to Rakuten more than three months ago following losses of NT$1.6 billion. Swancor Holding yesterday announced that it had booked an asset disposal gain of NT$388.87 million on top of another US$8 million. The commission also approved Danish energy company Orsted Wind Power TW Holding’s plan to invest NT$5 billion to develop its offshore wind farms off the coast of Changhua County. In related news, the Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday approved two companies’ applications to join two of its three programs launched this year to encourage domestic investments.

By Sean Lin / Staff reporterThe first round of cross-caucus negotiations on an anti-infiltration bill yesterday yielded few results after lawmakers failed to agree on the wording of a draft article. Despite the Legislative Yuan being in recess, Legislative Speaker Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) called for the talks ahead of a final review scheduled for Tuesday next week. The DPP caucus then proposed altering Article 2, which includes groups, organizations and agencies “supervised by” the government, affiliated organizations or any intermediary of an external hostile force. The lawmakers resolved to also defer all motions related to the article for further deliberation on Tuesday. Following more than three hours of discussion, the four caucuses only managed to discuss two of the 12 articles of the bill and only agreed on the legislation’s title: the anti-infiltration act.

By Chen Ching-min / Staff reporterThe Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) yesterday vowed to become the nation’s largest party at the launch of its nationwide motorcade campaign for the Jan. 11 legislative elections. Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), who is also TPP chairman, told a news conference at the Taiwan New Cultural Movement Memorial Museum in Taipei that the party would not settle for being the third-largest, but would set its sights on becoming the largest party that shapes Taiwan’s politics. The New Cultural Movement, whose credo was to embrace progressive values, was a manifestation of Taiwanese desire to change the “status quo,” he said. The TPP would unite people to move the nation forward, giving people a new option other than the pan-green and pan-blue camps, he said. Ultimately, politics is about executive power, and politicians not only need to identify problems and troublemakers, they also need to be able to solve issues, he said.

By Rachel Lin and Dennis Xie / Staff reporter, with staff writerFaculty and students from several universities yesterday protested outside the Ministry of Education to demand that it require public universities to establish budget auditing committees. Budget auditing members should not be considered to be in opposition to a university president, National Taiwan University (NTU) professor Wang Li-sheng (王立昇) said, adding that he has worked on the NTU budget auditing committee. Tainan National University of the Arts professor Wu Yung-yi (吳永毅) said that he often sees disputes regarding the management of school funds. A democratic campus needs to come with a democratic system of budget auditing, he said. “An effective auditing system of university funds can be an example of exercising democracy on campus, as it affects not only faculty and students’ rights, but also the future of national education,” he said.

BloombergVietnam’s economic growth slowed in the fourth quarter amid weakening global demand and US-China trade tensions. “We’re coming from a higher base so it will be difficult” for Vietnam to keep up this pace, he said. “The real questions are around what 2020 will mean for Vietnam if US-China trade relations stabilize.”Exports rose 10.1 percent last month compared with a year earlier, while imports climbed 11 percent. Compared with the third quarter, exports contracted 4.6 percent, dragging down the fourth-quarter GDP figure, the office said. “Trade disputes between major economies could undermine export momentum over the short term, while Vietnam’s economy remains susceptible to a further slowdown in the global economy through trade and investment channels,” the World Bank said in its economic report released on Tuesday last week.

BloombergTesla Inc is to start delivering China-built vehicles on Monday, a major milestone for CEO Elon Musk’s company as it mounts a push to expand in the world’s largest electric vehicle market. Musk is counting on the China plant to help build on momentum for the company in the world’s largest market both for electric vehicles and autos in general. Earlier yesterday, the China-built Model 3 was included on a list of vehicles qualifying for an exemption from a 10 percent purchase tax in the country. The locally built Model 3 would be priced from about US$50,000, Tesla said in October. Further helping Tesla, the China-built model this month qualified for a government subsidy of as much as about 25,000 yuan (US$3,572) per vehicle.

AP, ALMATY, KazakhstanAn airplane with 98 people aboard yesterday crashed shortly after takeoff, killing at least 12 people, while 49 were hospitalized with injuries, Kazakh officials said. The Bek Air aircraft hit a concrete fence and a two-story building after takeoff from Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city and former capital. Local authorities had earlier put the death toll at 15, but the Kazakh Ministry of the Interior later revised the figure downward, without explaining. The company manufacturing the aircraft went bankrupt in 1996 and the production of the Fokker-100 stopped the following year. All Bek Air and Fokker-100 flights in Kazakhstan were suspended pending an investigation of the crash, authorities said.

By Huang Yu-zhe 黃于哲A constitutional crisis between the Judicial Yuan and the Control Yuan has sparked controversy. Intriguingly, Taiwan has two other powers: the Examination Yuan and the Control Yuan. Yet, in practice, most would agree that the Examination Yuan is part of the executive branch, while the Control Yuan is part of the legislative. The Control Act (監察法) stipulates that the Control Yuan shall exercise the powers of impeachment, censure and audit, and propose corrective measures against civil servants. In Taiwan, judges are civil servants regulated by law and, therefore, these measures are applicable.

The commission on Tuesday announced the first rule, which set a minimum ratio for death benefits to policy account value. Some savings-type policies that feature high survival benefits offer few death benefits, with their average death benefits to account value ratio slightly higher than 100 percent, Tsai said. Life insurers would need to redesign their product programs and recalculate the amount of death benefits and premiums according to the age of the insured, Tsai said. For policies that mainly concentrate on survival benefits, such as savings-type policies, life insurance firms must increase the death benefits, which would buoy premiums, Tsai said. IMPLEMENTATIONThe rules would apply to all new life insurance policies sold after July 1 next year, Tsai said.

By Lin Chia-nan / Staff reporterPeople should have the freedom to breathe fresh air, just as they have the freedoms of speech and assembly, environmental group Air Clean Taiwan said on Thursday, as it prepared to stage an annual march against air pollution in Taipei tomorrow. The event is to begin at noon in front of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) and march toward Liberty Square (自由廣場), the group said. In a democratic nation, people should have equal rights to breathe fresh air, but residents of central and southern Taiwan often suffer from worse air quality, he said. Economic development is important, but officials should think about the environment they want to leave to future generations, National Federation of Teachers’ Unions president Chang Hsu-cheng (張旭政) said, adding that the federation would galvanize teachers for a long-term fight for fresh air. The nation’s yearly average concentration of PM2.5 has declined from 24 micrograms per cubic meter in 2013 to 16.2 last month, EPA data showed.