Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (
"The year 2007 is an important year for KMT. On the one hand, we have to face the legislative election. On the other hand, it's a test of how much the KMT has accomplished in reforming the party," Ma said to the press after the New Year's Day Flag-Raising Ceremony yesterday morning.
He said that the party expects to handle all of its assets by the end of June, but he did not specify how this would be done.
Ma added that the KMT would engage in fund-raising to cover its election campaign expenses in the future.
In response to Ma's comments, President Chen Shui-bian (
"The public is watching what the KMT is doing. The KMT might be able to trick the people once or twice, but they cannot fool them all the time," Chen said. "I believe Chairman Ma is much more aware of this than I am."
Chen made the remarks during a question-and-answer session on the high-speed rail yesterday morning. Chen took the press corps on a ride on the nation's first bullet train from Banciao (
Chen said that the KMT's sales of its stolen assets were not what the public expected the party to do nor was it the best way to tackle the problem.
"The public is the best judge of the matter and history will make the final judgment," he said.
"As Taiwan has transformed itself from an authoritarian state to a democracy, everyone has the responsibility to correct problems caused by transitional justice," he said.
Meanwhile, deputy director of the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) Policy Research and Coordinating Committee Lo Cheng-fang (
The DPP official said that the KMT had been trying to delay the nation's recovery of the assets by boycotting the bills designed to force the KMT to return its stolen assets in the legislature and the DPP's campaign to hold a referendum on the assets problem in the Cabinet's Referendum Review Com-mission over the past year.
"Ma himself sold KMT assets worth up to NT$25 billion [US$767 million] within a year after he became the party's chairman and many of the assets he sold were `controversial,'" he said.
"The KMT should show the public its sincerity [in handling the assets controversy] by stopping further sales of its assets, explaining to the public how it sold its assets in the past and returning all the profits from the assets sales to the nation," he added.
Lo said that the DPP had submitted to the Central Election Commission about 120,000 signatures it had gathered in a campaign initiated last October to recover the KMT's stolen assets. The commission later had district household registration offices across the nation verify the validity of the signatures.
All of the offices had completed the verification except the ones in Taipei City, he said, adding that the KMT might have exploited its administrative power to slow down the process in the counties and cities governed by KMT chiefs.
Lo added that the DPP hoped the first-stage signature verification process would be completed soon so that the campaign could move on to the second stage -- garnering another 830,000 signatures.
According to the Referendum Law (
After passing the threshold, another 830,000 signatures have to be gathered within six months for a referendum to be held.
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