George Wang (王可富), lawyer and former legal consultant to Ma Ho-ling (馬鶴凌), yesterday filed suit against 13 elite members of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — including President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) — accusing them of breach of trust and embezzling NT$200 billion (US$6.3 billion) worth of party assets.
“Ma Ying-jeou is behind the unexplained depreciation of party assets,” Wang said as he filed the suit with the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office.
Ma Ho-ling, who died in 2005, was Ma Ying-jeou’s father.
Photo: Chien Li-chung, Taipei Times
Wang said he had sought meetings with Ma Ying-jeou to address the party’s lingering issues with its potentially ill-gotten assets, as well as to tackle problems associated with veterans’ pensions, but has been rejected three times.
A 56-year KMT member, Wang said that his annual membership fees were part of the party’s assets, which he said shrank from NT$200 billion in 2000 to just NT$27 billion in 2006 for unknown reasons.
He added that the KMT was wrong for appropriating public property into party assets, properties he said must be returned to the state.
Wang said that Ma Ying-jeou, KMT chairman from 2006 until early last month, and 12 other prominent figures in the KMT’s ruling body between 2000 and 2006 — including former vice president Lien Chan (連戰) — must be held responsible for the unexplained plunge in value and the damage done to members.
Wang highlighted differences among various reports of asset value, saying that former KMT treasurer Liu Tai-ying (劉泰英) once estimated holdings to be worth NT$200 billion, while New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu’s (朱立倫) assessment was just NT$100 billion, Wang said.
Moreover, he added, the party’s own assets report — submitted to the Ministry of the Interior in 2013 — tallied a total value of just NT$26.8 billion.
“The figure showed a steep plummet from Liu’s and Chu’s estimations,” Wang said.
Saying that no party assets were returned to the state — nor used for charity — between 2000 and 2006, Wang questioned the cause of their plummeting value.
He called on the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office to summon Liu, Chu and former president and former KMT chairman Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) for questioning to calibrate and clarify what happened to the party’s assets since Lee stepped down as chairman in 2000.
Besides Ma Ying-jeou and Lien, Wang’s suit named former KMT chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) and other KMT officials, including Chiang Ping-kun (江丙坤), John Kuan (關中), Lin Feng-cheng (林豐正) and Chan Chun-po (詹春柏). KMT Vice Secretary-General Lin Te-jui (林德瑞) also made the list.
This story has been corrected since it was first published.
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
US climber Alex Honnold is to attempt to scale Taipei 101 without a rope and harness in a live Netflix special on Jan. 24, the streaming platform announced on Wednesday. Accounting for the time difference, the two-hour broadcast of Honnold’s climb, called Skyscraper Live, is to air on Jan. 23 in the US, Netflix said in a statement. Honnold, 40, was the first person ever to free solo climb the 900m El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park — a feat that was recorded and later made into the 2018 documentary film Free Solo. Netflix previewed Skyscraper Live in October, after videos
Starting on Jan. 1, YouBike riders must have insurance to use the service, and a six-month trial of NT$5 coupons under certain conditions would be implemented to balance bike shortages, a joint statement from transportation departments across Taipei, New Taipei City and Taoyuan announced yesterday. The rental bike system operator said that coupons would be offered to riders to rent bikes from full stations, for riders who take out an electric-assisted bike from a full station, and for riders who return a bike to an empty station. All riders with YouBike accounts are automatically eligible for the program, and each membership account
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS