Tkatchenko announces closure of Taipei trade office, plans for smaller set up

By LULU MAGINDE
FOREIGN Affairs Minister Justin Tkatchenko announced the closure of Papua New Guinea’s Taipei trade office in Taiwan.
Tkatchenko explained that after a full cost benefit analysis of the office, it would be shut down but that a smaller office would replace it and added that this would be the first of more foreign service missions to be closed.
“From the Department of Foreign Affairs, we’ve come to the conclusion that the office was no longer needed, but we’ll be setting up a new office, lower than what it was to ensure that we can have a better understanding between Taipei and PNG,” he said.
He described an assault that unfolded in Taiwan involving a PNG diplomatic staff as an embarrassment and that they were all called back immediately and banned for life from serving in the foreign service. The diplomat made headlines for attacking his wife and an employee of a Taipei restaurant in a drunken rage in September last year.
Following the incident, the diplomat’s wife was in coma while the restaurant employee required six stitches.
The diplomat worked as secretary at the PNG representative office in Taiwan.
The new office would be called the PNG Taipei Economic office and would be headed by a business liaison official, run in conjunction with the Chinese and Taiwanese governments.