Foreign execs' resignation affects HSR: chair

Ou Chin-der said the foreign professionals have been hurt by the accusations which claim that the foreigners and other high-ranking local executives are entitled to extraordinarily high salaries despite the fact that the company has been running in the red.

Ou said that he is trying his best to keep the professionals, explaining that at the current stage of its transport operations, the company still needs the foreign executives' expertise and skills in the maintenance and repairing of the High Speed Rail.

In the international market, there's a high demand for experts in high speed railway operations. After submitting their resignations, the former THSRC foreign executives have obtained an average of three job offers in other countries, Ou said.

Each job opportunities will pay them a salary that is on average 1.5 to 2 times higher than what they are being paid now by THSRC, he added.

Meanwhile, Ou pointed out that the number of foreign employees in THSRC is dropping, with only around 80 remaining.

The number of foreign staff had once accounted for one-third of the company's total manpower during the railway construction period, but fell to 3.7 percent in 2008 and then further to 2.6 percent in August.

The manpower structure will undergo another change in June 2010, Ou revealed.

The “fat cat” criticisms arose in September when Ou was picked by THSRC's board of directors to replace Nita Ing as company chairman in an effort to streamline company operations. At that time, THSRC's annual reports showed the company paid each of its 22 vice presidents over NT$2 millionper year while each of its three foreign consultants earned NT$10 million annually.

Ing's annual salary reached as high as NT$13 million before she offered to forego her wages earlier this year when the THSRC initiated a 10 percent to 20 percent cut in the salaries of its high-ranking executives.

THSRC, a private company that built the 345-kilometer high-speed railway and operated the line under a build-operate-transfer (BOT) contract with the government, has lost money since the railway began operating in January 2007.

In the two and a half years since the end of June 2009, it has accumulated losses of over NT$70 billion (US$2.16 billion) — about 66 percent of its paid-in capital of NT$105.3 billion — and total debts of NT$400 billion.

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