At a separate setting yesterday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators expressed dissatisfaction with the report.
“President Ma should reject the report,” KMT Legislator Chiu Yi (邱毅) told reporters at the legislature. “The report is simply a list of corruption cases that have been investigated recently. Is there any major anti-corruption breakthrough in the report?” Chiu asked.
Chiu said the MND and the MOJ were attempting to fool the president with the report.
KMT Legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) wanted the ministers of justice and national defense to take responsibility for failing to demonstrate the government’s anti-corruption achievements in the report.
“If they don’t take responsibility for the report, how can the public tell whether the Ma administration really meant it when Ma vowed to combat corruption?” she said.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers were also critical of the report. DPP Legislator Wang Sing-nan (王幸男) said it mostly listed corruption cases involving pan-green figures but few KMT politicians.
“Which goes to prove the Ma government only probed green politicians and officials, but covered up for blue individuals,” Wang said.
The report also listed Ma’s mayoral allowance case in 2007, in which he was later found not guilty.
“The Ministry of Justice only listed the case to stress Ma’s ‘cleanness’ and ‘innocence,’” Wang said.
“The ministry is flattering Ma,” he said.
Saying that most of the cases listed on the report are old, DPP Legislator Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) said DPP lawmakers had filed a number of corruption cases against officials who are KMT members but none of those cases were listed in the report.
Meanwhile, on the MOJ’s proposed measure suggesting that rules be drafted to regulate the behavior of political commentators, National Communications Commission (NCC) spokesperson Lee Ta-sung (李大嵩) said yesterday that he had not read the report and needed to see it before commenting.
Currently, the Satellite Broadcasting Act (衛星廣播電視法) has no article regulating the behavior of the political commentators.
Lee said the NCC has completed the proposed amendment to the act and was ready to submit it to the Executive Yuan for final approval.
“We have asked news programs to establish a fact-checking mechanism in the amendment,” Lee said. “But that requirement only applies to television news programs and does not extend to political talk shows.”
“If news reporters want to quote political commentators, the reporters must be responsible for checking the facts that political commentators give,” he said.
The fact-checking requirement in the proposed amendment to the act was interpreted earlier by some media as a way to muzzle political commentators.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY RICH CHANG, FLORA WANG AND SHELLEY SHAN
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