Cabinet to draft bill regulating party businesses

A day after Vice President Lien Chan (連戰) declared that political parties should no longer run businesses, central government officials said yesterday that a draft law regulating political parties, including articles separating them from businesses, will be drawn up within two months.

Premier Vincent Siew (蕭萬長), who is Lien's running mate for the KMT in the March presidential election, said a set of bills aimed at curbing political parties' profit-making ventures is being drafted by the Ministry of the Interior and will be ready "soon."

"Minister of the Interior Huang Chu-wen (黃主文) told me he is confident of finishing the draft before February," Siew said.

Lien pledged on Sunday that the KMT will put its profit-oriented business interests in trust after the enactment of a "Political Party Law."

Speaking at the inauguration ceremony for his campaign headquarters in Taipei, Lien proposed that laws be passed to regulate lobby groups in the Legislative Yuan and donations to political parties. This would help to clean up Taiwan politics, the KMT included, he said.

Siew said other bills, such as those clarifying lobbying rules, and those requiring public servants to reject offers seeking favoritism in public affairs, will soon be passed into law. This, he said, will create a fairer environment for political competition.

Interior minister Huang said the bills regulating political parties' activities are highly political by their nature, and may have certain negative effects on the political arena in the short term. But he also said he believed they will strengthen Taiwan's party politics, and will facilitate positive interaction among parties in the long term.

Ministry officials have been quoted as saying there is no decision yet on exactly how parties should be restricted in their business activities, but that the ministry would continue to allow them to invest in profit-oriented businesses -- as long as such assets are entrusted to institutional managers.

But critics said political parties should be banned from being involved in any profit-oriented business whatsoever.

"It is meaningless for a party to entrust its assets, because those assets ultimately still belong to the party," said Wu Tung-yeh (吳東野), a political analyst at National Chengchi University. "It is totally inconsistent with fair competition among parties [as Lien has pledged to achieve]."

"It is easy to write a party law, but it is difficult to deal with the KMT's assets," he said. "Its businesses are everywhere, in every walk of life."

DPP lawmaker Su Huan-chih (蘇煥智), a lawyer by profession, also expressed his doubts over what could really be achieved by entrusting party assets.

"The KMT has already successfully laundered its assets by moving them into the hands of a large number of shareholders through so-called `privatization' of its companies," Su said. "The trick is that the KMT still easily controls these companies, even with less than a majority shareholding."

In any case, regulating parties' business affiliations by law is something that should be decided by broad consensus among the major parties, said Herman Chiang (江岷欽), chairman of the public policy department at National Chung Hsing University.

Chiang agrees with an article the interior ministry is planning to put into its political party bill: that government subsidies for elections go directly to parties, rather than to individual candidates. Currently, a subsidy of NT$30 is paid to candidates for every vote that they gain.