The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee yesterday filed a complaint with the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office accusing former National Women’s League chairwoman Cecilia Koo (辜嚴倬雲) and two others of misappropriating and destroying league documents that could contain information vital to the implementation of transitional justice.
The complaint was filed by a committee representative against Koo, her third-youngest daughter, Koo Huai-ju (辜懷如), and Koo Huai-ju’s assistant, surnamed Liu (劉), after the committee completed several rounds of interviews with league staff and concerned parties in its investigation into the organization’s missing account books and archives predating 2006.
According to the committee, testimonies provided by the interviewees showed that under Cecilia Koo’s instructions, league workers in May last year packed the documents into 170 boxes and moved them to a unit at a residential building on Taipei’s Dehui Street.
Photo: Tsung Chang-chin, Taipei Times
Between late November and early December last year, Liu moved the boxes to another building on Zhongshan N Road Sec 2 at Koo Huai-ju’s behest, the committee said in a statement.
The pair subsequently destroyed the documents using three shredders as per Cecilia Koo’s request, the statement said.
“The minute Cecilia Koo was removed by the Ministry of the Interior as league chairwoman on Dec. 22, these league properties were no longer in her possession,” committee spokeswoman Shih Chin-fang (施錦芳) said.
“However, not only did she misappropriate them, but she also asked her daughter to shred all ‘unnecessary documents’ without the approval of other league members,” Shih added.
Although both Koos have maintained that only Cecilia Koo’s personal belongings have been destroyed, none of them were able to tell the committee the whereabouts of the missing documents, Shih said, adding: “Now is time to let the evidence speak.”
Shih said the only things the committee has recovered are 10 boxes of items delivered to them late last month by a truck driver hired by Koo Huai-ju, most of which contain the former league leader’s personal effects.
The committee has also received five boxes of documents found recently by league staff, which included the league’s work reports from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as records of meetings with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the Friends of the Armed Forces Association and importer and exporter associations concerning the Military Benefit Tax, Shih said.
Defending the committee’s decision to take legal action against the three, Shih said the missing documents were imperative to the nation’s ongoing effort to achieve transitional justice.
“If someone purposely destroyed such documents despite knowing their importance to the restoration of truth in the nation’s [authoritarian] history, they will not be accepted by the law nor the people,” she said.
On Feb. 1, the league was listed as a KMT affiliate by the committee because of its links to the KMT.
Questions have risen over its controversial access to the Military Benefit Tax, a tariff levied on all imported goods from 1955 to 1989 that provided most of the funding for the league’s work.
The league was founded in 1950 and headed for decades by former president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) wife Soong Mayling (宋美齡).
She was succeeded by Cecilia Koo in 2003 after her passing.
Cecilia Koo was stripped of her chairwomanship due to her reluctance to hand over documents detailing how the tax was used and sign a government-proposed administrative contract, which would have seen the league voluntarily dissolve itself and donate 90 percent of its total assets, or about NT$34.3 billion (US$1.17 billion at the current exchange rate), to state coffers.
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