TAIPEI (Taiwan News) -- As the cigarette scandal continues to smolder, China Airlines (CAL, 中華航空) on Sunday (July 28) announced that it estimates that 41,904 cartons of cigarettes have been preordered through 24 presidential flights since 2006.
On July 22, news broke that two officers of the National Security Bureau (NSB) allegedly had brought about 10,000 cartons of cigarettes duty-free into the country using the president's arrival as cover. Later investigations alleged that the practice had been going on since at least 2014 under President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
At a press conference on Sunday, CAL confirmed that on the most recent presidential flight, a total of 10,009 cigarettes cartons had been sold, of which 9,274 had been ordered beforehand and 735 were sold on board. It said that on the 10 presidential flights from 2014 to 2019, a total of 35,121 cartons of cigarettes have been preordered, reported CNA.
Last week, CAL came under fire from Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), Deputy Minister Wang Kwo-tsai (王國材), and other officials, after CAL chairman Hsieh Shih-chien (謝世謙) said that data from flights before 2013 had been lost after a computer system upgrade. However, on Sunday, the airline said that after mobilizing application system and database management personnel to pore over the records, it has successfully retrieved all data since 2013.
Now that the older data has been retrieved, CAL said that there had been 5,887 preorders for cigarettes on 14 presidential flights from 2006 to 2013, reported CNA. In addition, two of former president Ma Ying-jeou's 2015 trips included the preordering of another 896 cartons, reaching a total of 41,904 between 2006 and 2019, according to the report.
The cigarette-smuggling scandal now encompasses the current administration of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), along with both terms of former president Ma, who served from May 20, 2008 – May 20, 2016, as well as the second term of former president Chen Shu-bian (陳水扁), who was in office from May 20, 2000 to May 20, 2008. With 200 cigarettes in a cartoon, that makes a total of 8,380,800 potentially smuggled cigarettes on Taiwanese presidential flights since 2006.
