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Cabinet forms task force to recover filched assets

The Cabinet hopes to reclaim seven cinemas and two buildings improperly acquired by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) by the Lunar New Year as the KMT yesterday agreed to return part of its party assets stolen during its 50-year rule.

The Cabinet will also form a five-person task force to address the issue and work out incentives to encourage political functionaries, including career civil servants and political appointees, involved in the inappropriate acquisition of the KMT's party assets to provide information.

"We won't hold them administratively responsible because they were pressured to cooperate back then," Cabinet Spokesman Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) quoted Premier Yu Shyi-kun as saying during a press conference yesterday afternoon.

Yu made the remarks during a closed-door meeting of the Cabinet's National Assets Management Committee which he chaired. High on the agenda was the assets the KMT stole during its half-century in power.

After discussing the matter with the KMT this morning, Minister of Finance Lin Chuan (林全) told the press conference that the KMT agreed to return some properties still in fact owned by the party but where the title has either been transferred to a different "owner" or the property has been "sold" to another owner for a notional sum.

"We hope they mean what they say and put their promise into practice," he said.

In addition to the seven cinemas and the two buildings -- the Shih Chien Building (實踐大樓) and the Shih Chien Hall (實踐堂), Lin, who heads the Cabinet's task force, said that two more disputed pieces of properties will be targeted.

They are the KMT's headquarters building on Chungshan South Road and a lot on Ren-ai Road where the KMT-owned Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC,中廣) used to stand.

"I'm afraid we can only appeal to the KMT's conscience while the bill regarding the disposition of assets improperly obtained by political parties (政黨不當取得財產處理條例) has not yet passed the legislature and we haven't formulated any concrete measure to pre-empt the KMT's efforts to liquidate and launder its assets," Lin said.

Lin also announced that the transportation ministry yesterday had filed a misappropriation lawsuit against BCC.

The ministry in 1952 spent NT$150,000 buying two parcels of land, totaling 10 hectares, in Minhsiung, Chiayi County and an additional NT$2 million on broadcasting equipment for Central Broadcasting System (CBS,央廣), originally a subordinate department of BCC, to continue propaganda broadcasting to China.

The land was registered under BCC but has been used by the CBS as a relay station since then. CBS expanded in 1972 and became the responsibility of the Ministry of National Defense in 1980 and then a corporate body in 1996.

Claiming that the land belongs to the company, BCC started requesting CBS either return or rent the two parcels of land in January 1998, but its requests were met with defiance.

Last month the Chiayi District Court ruled in favor of BCC in a lawsuit it had filed against CBS in June last year. CBS has vowed to appeal.
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