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DPP chairman pushes to recover KMT stolen assets

Acting Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairman Chai Trong-rong (蔡同榮) said yesterday he will push party officials harder in the party's campaign to have the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) stolen assets returned to the state.

Chai told a press conference that the party was falling behind its goal to collect 1 million signatures by the end of July -- the deadline for it to pass the threshold required for such a referendum to be held.

"One more week and it will be three months since we put forth the referendum proposal, but we have only gotten about 100,000 signatures," he said. "We are really lagging behind our goal by a large margin."

The party assigned a signature quota to each party official after it launched the campaign early this year. For example, the party chairman is responsible for gathering 5,000 signatures while each Central Standing Committee member is responsible for 3,000 signatures each.

Chai said the party will publicize the names of party officials who have achieved their signature quota as an incentive to others.

The DPP will also disclose the identity of party officials who "score zero" in their share so that "the public will know which DPP members did not fulfill their responsibility."

If the party fails to garner more than 830,000 signatures as stipulated in the Referendum Law (公投法), the assets referendum proposal will be prohibited from being initiated for the next three years, he said.

According to the party's statistics, as of last Friday, 142,516 signatures had been garnered, with only five party officials having met their quota.

Among the party's four presidential hopefuls, only DPP Chairman Yu Shyi-kun, Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) and former premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) had reached their quotas, while Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) had completed only 25.1 percent of her 3,000 signature quota.
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