Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential nominee Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) topped the list of political donations received by candidates for the mayoral election in the five metropolitan cities in November last year, Control Yuan data showed.
The report on political donations made to mayoral candidates in Taipei City, New Taipei City (新北市), Greater Taichung, Greater Tainan City and Greater Kaohsiung showed that Tsai received about NT$144 million (US$5.04 million) for her bid to take New Taipei City, which she lost to the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Eric Chu (朱立倫).
The political contributions given to Tsai are far ahead of those received by other candidates in terms of the total amount donated, the number of individual donors, the number of anonymous donors and the total amount of anonymous donations.
Of the NT$144.27 million Tsai received, NT$89.04 million came from individual donors, NT$28.12 million from enterprises, NT$2.85 million from political parties, NT$930,000 from civic groups and NT$23.33 million from anonymous donors.
A total of 3,221 anonymous donors and 7,778 individuals made contributions to Tsai’s campaign, with amounts ranging from NT$1 to NT$100,000.
The donations to Tsai were NT$2.19 million less than total expenditures for her campaign.
Former premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), who vied with Tsai for the DPP’s nomination in the -presidential primary earlier this year, received about NT$141.72 million in political contributions in his bid for Taipei mayor against the KMT’s incumbent Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌).
Of the donations received by Su’s camp, NT$82.63 million came from individuals, NT$38.32 million from enterprises, NT$17.99 million from political parties, NT$170,000 from civic groups and NT$2.61 million from anonymous donors.
DPP Greater Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) came in third with NT$99.11 million, followed by former DPP Kaohsiung County Commissioner Yang Chiu-hsing (楊秋興), who ran as an independent in the three-way election that also included KMT Legislator Huang Chao-shun (黃昭順).
Chu received NT$89.67 million in donations, higher than the donations received by the other four KMT candidates, including Hau, Huang, Greater Taichung City Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) and Greater Tainan candidate Kuo Tien-tsai (郭添財).
Commenting on the numbers yesterday, DPP spokesperson Lin Yu-chang (林右昌) said this reflected the success of its “small personal donations” drive.
“The DPP’s resources are extremely limited,” Lin said. “However, the small personal donations drive we initiated evidently generated public support ... We hope this can continue.”
A closer look at the figures showed that the DPP spent about NT$24.6 million to subsidize the individual campaigns of its five candidates.
However, most of that figure reflected donations made to the candidate through the party, which issued the receipts, Lin said, saying this explained the seven-fold discrepancy in party funding between Tsai and Su.
Su, the Taipei City candidate, received NT$18 million from the party, records show, while Tsai received NT$2.45 million. Chen Chu took the smallest amount of all five candidates — NT$180,000 — despite winning by the largest margin.
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