If there is criticism to be made of President Chen Shui-bian (
To show to what degree the story has developed a life of its own, having nothing to do with either the known facts or common sense, the Associated Press' story of the day from Taiwan yesterday led with this paragraph: "President Chen Shui-bian has pledged to fight corruption and financial crimes as his ruling political party struggles to clean itself of allegations that it took illegal donations from a bankrupt former real-estate tycoon."
Where does one start debunking this nonsense -- apart from remarking that Tuntex was a petro-chemical company? Perhaps with pointing out that, since there is no law regulating donations, no donation, in and of itself, can be illegal. What can be illegal is the purpose for which the donation is made or accepted or the purpose to which the money is put. For example, pan-blue vice presidential candidate James Soong's (宋楚瑜) pocketing of the NT$100 million that Chen Yu-hao gave to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in 1991 and which made its way into the private bank accounts of Soong's family members is an obviously illegal use of a legal donation.
At first the blue camp was trying to suggest that President Chen had done a Soong and trousered Chen Yu-hao's largesse. When the DPP showed copies of the "thank you" notes they had given the Tuntex boss, the pan-blues changed their tune and asserted that Chen Yu-hao's pittance of a donation -- NT$10 million, hardly enough to buy a small apartment in downtown Taipei -- had gained him favorable financial attention from the DPP; in particular that it was in return for this pocket change that the DPP granted him low-interest loans in 2001. These accusations actually conflict with what Chen Yu-hao claims, which is that he gave the money to the DPP to secure financial help for the ailing Tuntex -- which was, nevertheless, not forthcoming.
If the DPP did take the money promising special financial treatment as a quid pro quo, that is an example of the other kind of illegality mentioned above. But did they? There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that they did. It is true that the government did help Tuntex in 2000 to 2001. But that was part of the continuation of a policy that the KMT itself had started in 1997, when finding many of its cronies -- prominent among whom was Chen Yu-hao -- hard-hit by the Asian financial crisis, the KMT ordered banks to roll over their loans, rather than turn off their credit. Indeed it is exactly because of this policy that Chen Yu-hao's depredations, when they came to light, had become so massive.
What needs attention, in fact, is not the Tuntex chief's donations to the DPP but his entire relationship to the KMT: Chen Yu-hao donated hundreds of million of NT dollars to the KMT in return for which the government kept the credit taps of the state-run banks open for him. How cozy.
Perhaps we can expect this story to die down now we know how it came about in the first place -- as an attempt by officials in Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office to interfere in the election in the pan-blue camp's favor. As for Chen Yu-hao, he survives in China on the government's favor, praying, like so many other fugitives from Taiwan's justice, for a blue-camp victory so he can come home.
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