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Defense Ministry censured over mishandling of expired ammunition

ROC Central News Agency

2010/09/23 23:08:01

Taipei, Sept. 23 (CNA) The watchdog Control Yuan censured the Ministry of National Defense (MND) Thursday for its flawed handling of expired ammunition.

According to a report carried in Next Magazine in January, the MND commissioned a Singaporean company to destroy more than 8,000 tons of expired ammunition.

Under the terms of the contract, the ammunition should have been destroyed in Bulgaria, but the magazine said 1,884 tons were repackaged and sold to the African country of Angola by the family of the president of Romania before the East European country's presidential election in 2009.

After an extensive investigation, the Control Yuan said the MND did indeed commission Singapore-based Explomo Technical Services to destroy 950,000 rounds of outdated ammunition at a cost of NT$627.03 million, but it found no convincing evidence to verify the other claims in the magazine report.

Nevertheless, the watchdog body that monitors the civil service added that it could not disprove the report, either, because all of the documents and data available were solely provided by Variety Co., a foreign-based notary company.

"As Variety Co. was recommended by Explomo to certify the operations, we cannot confirm the truth of the information and documents presented by the company, " said Ke Yung-kuang, a Control Yuan member who co-authored the censure report along with his colleague Lee Fu-tian.

In the process of the investigation, Ke said, a number of drawbacks were exposed in the ministry's handling of the case. A major flaw lay in the absence of a supervisory mechanism to verify whether the contractor was likely to collude with a third party in transporting the expired ammunition to other destinations for profit, Ke said.

Moreover, he said, the deal violated the Government Procurement Act, which bars winning bidders of government contracts from outsourcing. The Singapore company should not have been allowed to bid for the contract in the first place because destruction of outdated ammunition is not on the official list of its service items, Ke pointed out, adding that Explomo was therefore forced to subcontract the deal to a Bulgarian disposal company. (By Sophie Yeh and Sofia Wu) ENDITEM/J