Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) said yesterday that she is confident she did not abuse her "special allowance fund" when she was Taoyuan County commissioner.
Lu said she had "no idea whatsoever" about how the fund was supposed to be handled, so she had simply followed the instruction of her staff.
"An executive will not dwell on trivialities," Lu said, adding that she "had confidence about her use of the public fund."
Lu made the remarks one day after a spokesman for the Taiwan High Court's Black Gold Investigation Center said that investigations into the suspected misuse of "special allowance funds" by many officials would soon get underway.
The spokesman's comments came just hours after former Taipei mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was indicted on charges of embezzlement from the special mayoral fund while he was Taipei mayor.
All public executives receive a special monthly allowance fund.
Although the money is to be spent at the administrator's discretion, half of the fund can be spent without providing receipts for the expenditures, while use of the other half must be substantiated with receipts.
The Black Gold Investigation Center has received complaints of abuse of the special funds against Lu, Premier Su Tseng-chang (
Lu said yesterday that if investigators wanted to launch an inquiry into her use of the Taoyuan County commissioner fund, they should also investigate how her predecessors and successors used their funds.
She said that when prosecutors were probing President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) use of the "state affairs fund," she had proposed that they look into how former presidents used their funds.
She said she also suggested that the scope of the investigation should extend to heads of the five branches of government and to lawmakers.
Lu made the remarks while visiting the Taipei Blood Center, where she was originally scheduled to donate blood.
She ended up not donating because she said she was recovering from a stomach flu.
Meanwhile, the DPP chairman said that he was not worried about possible investigations into how he and other prominent DPP members used their special allowances when they were government executives.
"I believe that, in addition to me, other party members [under investigation] are all innocent and law-abiding," Yu said.
"That was why we are willing to go through judicial investigations. I have nothing to hide," he said.
Yu faces a possible probe into his use of the Ilan County commissioner's special fund from his time in that job.
Additional reporting by Flora Wang
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