Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) investment management committee chairman Liu Tai-ying (劉泰英) said in an interview with the biweekly Chinese-language Wealth Magazine that former vice president Lien Chan (連戰) spent NT$12 billion (US$370.6 million at current exchange rates) when he was running for president in 2000.
Given Liu’s former position as treasurer of the KMT from April 1993 to April 2000, the figure is highly credible, and it certainly calls into question the amount that Lien reported to the Central Election Commission, which now appears to be altogether fictitious.
Article 39 of the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Act (總統副總統選舉罷免法) stipulates that candidates must, “within 30 days after the polling day, submit a declaration form of campaign incomes and expenditures to the Central Election Commission, to declare the settlement of the incomes and expenditures of campaign funds.”
The problem is that candidates’ declared incomes and expenditures are often false.
In 1996, Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) of the KMT was elected president, after which he declared his campaign expenditure as NT$290 million, but in a private conversation he revealed that the total expenditure was NT$2.5 billion, while Liu says it was NT$2 billion. Obviously, the declared campaign expenditure was phony. Furthermore, if Lee’s NT$2.5 billion and Liu’s NT$2 billion are both accurate, it is reasonable to suspect that the NT$500 million difference between the two figures represents off-the-books political donations that were accepted for the campaign.
In 2000, the campaign team of then-Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) presidential candidate Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) declared that it had raised NT$948 million and spent NT$949 million, while that of the KMT’s Lien declared a campaign fund totaling NT$310 million, NT$300 million of which it said was a subsidy from the KMT, while slightly more than NT$10 million came from fundraising.
However, considering the KMT’s size and wealth, who can believe that its expenditure on a presidential election would be less than a third of what the hard-up DPP spent? In addition, given the tendency of corporations to hedge their bets during political campaigns, it is beyond belief that they would donate just a little more than NT$10 million to the presidential candidate of the then-ruling KMT.
In 2004, the campaign team of then-DPP candidates Chen and Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), declared more than NT$1.23 billion in revenue and more than NT$1.22 billion in spending, while that of KMT candidate Lien, who teamed up with James Soong (宋楚瑜) of the People First Party (親民黨), reported that it had received a subsidy of more than NT$820 million from the KMT and not much more than NT$3 million from corporate and individual donors — a claim that seriously insults the intelligence of the public.
Therefore, the question is: If the party openly contributed NT$300 million in 2000, while it actually spent a total of NT$120 billion under the table, how many more times that amount did it spend in the 2004 elections when it said it openly contributed more than NT$820 million.
In 2008, the team of then-KMT candidates Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) declared NT$677 million in income and NT$639 million in expenditure, while the team of then-DPP candidates Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) and Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) reported an income of NT$440 million and expenditure of NT$427 million. Among the big conglomerates, only Formosa Plastics and Far Eastern Group declared that each had given tens of millions of New Taiwan dollars to the supposedly squeaky-clean Ma, but is that the true figure or just the tip of the iceberg?
In 2012, the team of KMT candidates Ma and Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) declared NT$446 million in income and NT$444 million in expenditure, while the team of then-DPP candidates Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and Su reported an income of NT$756 million and expenditure of NT$709 million. In view of the wall-to-wall television and newspaper advertisements taken out by the Ma-Wu campaign, the idea that it only spent a little more than 60 percent of what the Tsai-Su team spent turns empirical law and principle of proportionality completely upside down.
Do you remember Chen Ding-nan (陳定南), the DPP politician known as “Mr Clean?” After losing the last election for governor of Taiwan Province in 1994, Chen honestly declared his election campaign expenditure as NT$446 million and was fined NT$400,000 for exceeding the maximum election expenditure as defined by law. Meanwhile, the campaign spending declared by his rival Soong, then of the KMT, who won the election, was neither a cent more nor a cent less than the legally defined upper limit of NT$149.802 million.
What point is there in making candidates declare their election expenses at all if the numbers they report are so blatantly false?
Chang Kuo-tsai is a former deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Association of University Professors and a member of the Hsinchu Election Commission.
Translated by Yu-an Tu and Julian Clegg
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