The Taipei High Administrative Court should be held responsible if the National Women’s League (NWL) disposes of its assets, the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee said yesterday in response to the court’s decision on Tuesday to unfreeze the league’s assets.
The committee in February declared the league to be an affiliate of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and froze its assets totaling about NT$38.5 billion (US$1.25 billion).
During the KMT authoritarian period, the league used the party-state system to ask the public for “military donations” and distributed the money through the KMT’s social work committee, the committee said, adding that there is clear evidence of its affiliation.
Photo: Chen Yu-fu, Taipei Times
Judges Chen Chin-wei (陳金圍), Pi Nai-chun (畢乃俊) and Chen Hsin-hung (陳心弘) completely disregarded the evidence and the league can now use the funds as it pleases, it said.
The league applied to unfreeze its assets because it was dissatisfied with the committee’s decision to file an administrative suit, sources said.
The decision greatly damages fair competition among political parties and the nation’s transitional justice project, makes the sorting and retrieval of ill-gotten party assets more complicated and harms the public interest, the committee said.
The court in its press release disregarded the fact that transitional justice projects must always race against time and said that lifting the penalty would merely postpone the realization of transitional justice, the committee said.
The court is ignorant of the damage that would be done to the public interest and is essentially telling Taiwanese that there is no need to pursue transitional justice, it said.
Central Investment Co (中央投資公司) and Hsinyutai Co (欣裕台) had also applied to end the administrative penalties placed against them, but the Supreme Administrative Court rejected their requests, the committee added.
Tuesday’s ruling contradicts the Supreme Administrative Court’s ruling, it said.
The Taipei High Administrative Court only urged the league to consider the potential legal risks it might face and to handle its assets in a reasonable manner, it said.
The judges did not put any measure in place to prevent the league from using this opportunity to dispose of its assets, it added.
The league had illegally used about NT$2.4 million of its assets after it had already been declared a KMT affiliate, for which it was later fined, the committee said.
If the league uses large amounts of its assets and in doing so harms the public interest, the Taipei High Administrative Court should be held responsible, it added.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS