Party caucuses conducted their second-day of negotiation on six major bills yesterday but made little progress.
The multiparty negotiations dealt with three draft bills: revisions to statute governing the Executive Yuan's resolution trust corporation fund, amendments to the Statute Governing the Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (兩岸人民關係條例) and a first-round discussion for a draft organic law of the Cabinet's Financial Monitoring and Management Committee.
The negotiations over amendments to the cross-strait statute are deadlocked due to disagreement between the chairwoman of the Mainland Affairs Council and PFP Legislator Feng Ting-kuo (
The two are at odds over direct transportation between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Meanwhile, opposition members are demanding a decrease in the Executive Yuan's resolution trust corporation fund. The cut could be as great as NT$300 billion.
"The cut was proposed since opposition parties perceived that the government needs to cope with troubled finances with the least social cost. Therefore, we estimate that a maximum of the reduction could be up to NT$300 billion," explained Lee Tung-hao (
The fund, aiming at helping regional credit cooperatives by buying bad loans from banks and selling them to investors, has been cut from the originally proposed figure of NT$1.05 trillion to NT$680 billion when the draft revisions cleared their first review at the legislature.
Lee, also a finance professor at National Chengchi University, said the government must review its role in the financial restructuring plan. The government should not only solve problems for the ill-fated banks, but also needs to think about helping local banks to regain competitiveness, he said.
The draft organic law of the financial monitoring and management committee finished without consensus. A second discussion on the draft law is scheduled for Wednesday.
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