TAIPEI: Taiwan is prepared take back nearly 12,000 tonnes of toxic industrial waste exported to Malaysia after the environmental authorities found the import licence for the shipment was bogus, an official said Monday.

The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) received a tip-off in January that a Taipei-based group had been exporting the toxic waste to its Malaysian partner with a fake Malaysian import licence, an EPA official said.

The Malaysian government confirmed that the licence provided by the Malaysian company was false and the EPA immediately called a halt to the export, EPA Solid Waste Control Bureau chief Chen Hsiung-wen told reporters.

The company, Hung-Yiu Technology of Environmental Protection Co, had already transported 11,879 tonnes of the waste, which contains high levels of heavy metals, to Malaysia, he said.

The Taipei city government had issued the company with 11 export permits to ship 16,351 tonnes of waste to Malaysia from January to November of 2003.

"The EPA has actively informed the Malaysian government and the Interpol and asked them to track down on the event ... while having Hung-Yiu's existing export licences be revoked," Chen said.

Victim of scandal

It had also ordered Hung-Yiu "to ship back the waste to Taiwan if its Malaysian company could not properly process it," he said.

Hung-Yiu general manager TK Cheng said his company was itself a victim of the scandal as it had not known the import licence was fake.

"But we will take full responsibility," said Cheng.

Cheng said his Malaysian partner, SynEnviro Sdn Bhd, had said its waste-processing technology, called modular quasi-vitrification, was provided by a professor of Singapore's Nanyang University.

In 1999, the Taiwanese government ordered Formosa Plastic Group to bring back from Cambodia 2,700 tonnes of industrial waste, contaminated with mercury, that was reportedly linked to two deaths. - AFP