The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said yesterday it will seek a NT$30 million (US$911,000) bank loan to address its financial deficit.
The party's Central Standing Committee passed a resolution on the matter yesterday.
DPP Chairman Yu Shyi-kun told reporters after the committee meeting yesterday that the party would also raise funds as its finances were in dire straits.
"The financial condition of the party is terrible. We will not be able to cover staffers' paychecks after September. We must take out a loan," he said. "Everyone knows that the DPP does not have party assets. A large part of the expenditures has to be covered by funds raised by party officials."
Yu said the party's revenues this year and last year had been NT$60 million less than in previous years. Part of the reason for this, his said, was his decision, after he became chairman in January last year, to abolish the fund-raising quota by each party official, saying the scheme "could easily be misunderstood as collusion between government officials and business circles."
Yu said raising funds for the party had become even more difficult following last year's anti-President Chen Shui-bian (
"The situation the DPP finds itself in shows that the DPP is a party with integrity," he added.
The party began experiencing financial difficulties toward the end of last year, Yu said.
Last December, the party began planning personnel cutbacks, abolishing 20 percent of the 168 existing positions within the party.
The party also began merging some of its departments and to reorganize its office while not extending a lease of one of the three office floors it occupies.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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