Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) yesterday said the organization would return the ill-gotten assets obtained by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) during its authoritarian rule to their rightful owners.
During a plaque unveiling ceremony in Taipei, Premier Lin Chuan (林全) presented Koo with a seal and an appointment order, officially launching the committee.
“Some say we are attempting to settle accounts [with the KMT]. Indeed, we are settling an account with a political party that used its power and privilege, unavailable to ordinary organizations, to illegally acquire assets during its party-state rule,” Koo said.
“Settlement” entails understanding the injustice of the KMT’s use of state apparatuses to acquire properties, compensating victims and the nation and making the truth known to the world, Koo said.
“The handling of ill-gotten party assets is not made up or a historical issue. It is an overdue task left unfinished from the nation’s transition from an authoritarian regime to a democracy,” he said.
No one, including historians or experts, knows how much property the KMT collected and disposed of since its authoritarian rule, he added.
Koo said the committee would follow legal procedures to deal with illegal party assets, but added that a timetable for the organization’s work could not be immediately proposed.
Lin said that handling illegal party assets is necessary for the nation to understand its past and transition toward a mature democracy, adding that assets the committee recognizes as illegally acquired should be returned to their original owners or the state.
“Next year will be the 30th anniversary of the lifting of martial law. The nation’s democracy is still growing, and it is necessary to remove all obstacles impeding its achievement of a full-fledged democracy,” Lin said.
To ensure a level playing field, Germany in 1990 established a committee to review the assets of political parties and organizations active in East Germany during the Cold War, which did not complete its task until 2006, Lin said.
Germany’s experience shows that it requires a prolonged effort to push reform and transition, he added.
In response to a reporter’s question regarding the eligibility of committee member Lo Cheng-tsung (羅承宗), who was sentenced to six months in prison for contravening the Copyright Act (著作權法), an apparently enraged Koo said the Act Governing the Handling of Ill-gotten Properties by Political Parties and Their Affiliate Organizations (政黨及其附隨組織不當取得財產處理條例) does not disqualify people with a criminal record from being members of the committee.
Koo was also asked whether his Democratic Progressive Party membership would affect the committee’s objectivity, but he did not give a definitive answer, saying he did not understand the question.
He later said we would be happy to welcome KMT members to apply for positions on the committee.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not