Taipei City Councilor Chung Hsiao-ping (鍾小平) yesterday accused a Sanchih ossuary of fraudulently generating NT$25 billion from the sale of niches for the storage of cinerary urns that had not been completed.
An ossuary is a facility for the storage of the bones of the dead, while a cinerary urn is a vessel for holding the ashes of the dead.
Chung called upon the Ministry of Justice to conduct further investigations into the matter, the Straits Exchange Foundation to help extradite the chairman of the ossuary (currently believed to be in China) and the city's tax bureau to investigate the possibility of tax evasion.
Chung told reporters that Lin Ming-jen (林明仁), the owner of the island's largest and most profitable legal private ossuary, the Peihaifutso (北海福座) -- located on a 53.34 hectare site in Sanchih, Taipei County -- had dishonestly extracted over NT$25 billion from some hundreds of thousands of city and county residents over the past 10 years.
Since the company registered with the city government in 1990, he said, a total of over 380,000 niches had been sold at prices ranging from NT$70,000 to NT$300,000, generating total revenues in excess of NT$25 billion.
In the first three to four years alone, Chung said, over 180,000 niches were sold, providing an annual revenue of about NT$12 billion.
Originally in the insurance industry, Lin and his partners took advantage of their own business connections and those of their insurance agents to promote the business, with great success. The system they adopted, Chung said, was similar to a pyramid scheme, in which the agent on the higher level of the chain receives a better percentage of commission than his or her agents further down the chain. The more members they have and the higher their position, the more commission they get.
What's more, according to Chung, the county government issued the company's operating license in 1994, before the interior decoration of the sixth floor and above in the 17-story pagoda-shaped columbarium was complete, he said. "It's a perfect example of the government deliberately favoring the private sector," Chung said.
In addition, customers were compelled to purchase three niches at a time, Chung said, and those interested in the niches located on the sixth floor and above would get a document on which the location was left blank. If they wished to have a particular place assigned to them, they had to pay an additional NT$25,000 per niche, he said.
Another of the company's successful products was its funeral service, which brought in an additional NT$500 million to NT$1 billion, Chung said, all of which the company claimed was deposited at a bank in Luxemburg.
"I shall be arranging to see Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan (陳定南) and asking him to form a task force to conduct further investigations into this," he said.
Hsieh Jung-hua (
He later told the Taipei Times that in fact the company had been caught trying to evade tax twice in 1994 and had later been required to pay several hundred thousand dollars in outstanding taxes.
Lee Tung-chou (李東州) of Tamsui, Taipei County, who was invited to buy at least three niches at a time in a separate ossuary, said that he thought the ossuary business was a good investment.
Lee, who ended up with a total of nine niches, said that he might be able to sell some of them at a profit in the future.
He was introduced to the business in 1990 by one of his co-workers. He was later persuaded to invest NT$1 million, along with 10 others, to form a company of their own. When that company ceased selling niches in 1994, Lee said, he was rewarded with three more niches.
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