Call me puerile, but when the head of a fertilizer company called ‘Fan’ gets sacked, the headline sort of writes itself.
Former Taiwan Fertilizer Co. Chairman Fan Chen-tsung (范振宗) filed a slander suit against his former colleagues after returning to Taipei yesterday afternoon, adding to the ruckus over his controversy dismissal last week.
Fan, a Hakka community leader who served two terms (eight years) as Hsinchu County magistrate before being appointed as Taiwan Fertilizer chairman, said Huang had called him “human trash,” and Lin Chih-yao, the company’s supervisor, described him as “shit and garbage” while talking to reporters about the company’s poor management under Fan’s leadership.
The serious question in all this is: Why is chairman of a fertilizer company a political appointment? The government nowadays only has a minority stake in the company, so why hasn’t it given up its power to appoint the chairman?
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It’s the money…the company is stupidly profitable (lots of red envelopes) and has close ties to the agricultural base of Taiwan. Chen is hoping to get his own man in there because after 6 years, he’s finally low in enough in the polls to try to through some goodies back to his voter base. He doesn’t care if he alienates the Hakka.