A Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker yesterday renewed calls for the disclosure of information about the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) party assets, which was taken down from the government’s Web sites after the KMT regained power in 2008.
Premier Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) recently promised to reopen the Web sites, where a general inventory of the KMT’s party assets compiled by the former DPP administration was available, but the Ministry of Finance had decided not to follow through on his words, DPP Legislator Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君) said.
“Mao has gone back on his promise,” Cheng told a news conference.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
In the ministry’s reply to Cheng regarding the demand she made to Mao on March 17, the ministry said the information, kept in archives at the National Archives Administration, could be accessed via written requests, Cheng said.
In April 2007, the then-Research, Development and Evaluation Commission set up a Web site that listed the KMT’s assets, while the Ministry of Finance published an inventory of plots of land owned by the KMT and its affiliated organizations.
The moves were part of the former DPP administration’s efforts to recover assets allegedly acquired by the KMT through illegitimate means when it took over Taiwan from Japan.
Cheng said the KMT administration closed the Web sites in 2008 after KMT lawmakers threatened to slash the commission’s budget requests.
Cheng pressed Mao on the issue after New Taipei City Mayor and KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) decided not to fight lawsuits against the party over 10 of its assets.
Cheng called Chu’s announcement “fake reform.”
“If Chu had been sincere about the KMT’s party assets, he should have come clean about the whereabouts of NT$8.8 billion [US$282.3 million] the KMT earned from the sale of the three parcels of land in Renai Road [in Taipei], where the The Palace (帝寶) [luxury residential complex] was later built,” Cheng said.
One of the 10 properties Chu said that the KMT would give up, in Hualien County, is just one of the 16 properties the Broadcasting Corp of China (中廣) — previously owned by the KMT — illegitimately acquired from THK, owned by the Japanese colonial regime, along with three pieces of land on Renai Road and 10 pieces in New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋), Cheng said, adding the total declared value of the 16 properties is NT$36.2 billion.
Among the properties in Banciao, two were sold by the KMT to private owners and eight were recovered by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, Cheng said.
“The revenue of NT$8.8 billion and that earned from the sale of the two assets in Banciao should be returned to the Treasury,” she said.
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