Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) spokesperson Juan Chao-hsiung (阮昭雄) yesterday called on the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to make public its finances for its presidential and legislative election campaigns, saying the party has already spent about NT$300 million (US$9.07 million) on its presidential campaign ads alone.
Juan said that the KMT has spent at least NT$300 million on advertisements in newspapers, on television and radio, and on the Internet.
DPP spokesperson Yang Chia-liang (楊家俍) said the KMT has bought keywords and placed news articles on Web portals and social media, while maintaining an official Web site and Facebook page.
He said that the expenditure is estimated at about NT$250 million.
Of the rest, 35 million has been spent on TV ads, NT$9.1 million on radio ads and NT$7 million on newspaper ads, the DPP said.
For the legislative election campaign, “the KMT said earlier that each of its legislative candidates would receive about NT$3.8 million as a subsidy, but according to sources, the figure is actually at least NT$6 million per candidate,” Juan said. “Since the KMT has fielded 76 legislative candidates — 72 regional legislative candidates and four Aboriginal legislative candidates — the subsidies allocated total at least NT$400 million.”
Juan said the DPP seven days ago requested that KMT presidential candidate Eric Chu (朱立倫) make public his team’s expenditure for the campaign, just as the DPP has done, but Chu has been “avoiding the request and making excuses.”
Yang also called on Chu to stop selling any of the KMT’s assets until a proposed political party act and an act governing ill-gotten party assets had been passed.
Asked for a response to the DPP’s request, Chu said the DPP “might not have used the New Taiwan dollar as the currency [for estimating how much the KMT has spent], as it is definitely an unfounded allegation. I don’t know how they have come to this number.”
“I only know that [the KMT] has been depending on small donations. The public can see that we have been running these campaigns in a most economical way,” he said.
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