The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee is to send officials to the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) archives to examine records related to the party’s assets.
“We originally planned to visit the KMT’s archives on Friday, but had to postpone the visit until tomorrow [today] after the KMT told us that officials in charge of the records would not be there on Friday,” committee spokeswoman Shih Chin-fang (施錦芳) said in an interview with the Central News Agency yesterday.
The committee plans to send officials to the archives today, but that could change due to reports of planned protests against the committee’s actions, Shih said.
Photo: Peter Lo, Taipei Times
The Executive Yuan-affiliated committee has interviewed former KMT treasurers Liu Tai-ying (劉泰英) and Hsu Li-teh (徐立德), Shih said, declining to reveal the details of their conversations.
The plan to examine the KMT’s historical records came after committee Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) questioned the source of the KMT’s income earlier this month.
Party membership fees — which the KMT said it used to fund its affiliate Central Investment Co (中央投資公司) — only contributed 3 to 4 percent of its income in the 1950s, when it derived between 50 percent and 70 percent of its income from government subsidies, Koo said.
While government subsidies are a legal source of income for a political party, Koo questioned whether the KMT had abused its power during its authoritarian rule to secure the subsidies.
As the matter would require an audit of the KMT Central Standing Committee’s meeting minutes from that era, the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee reached an agreement in negotiations to request that the KMT’s archives provide the necessary documents.
The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee two weeks ago issued an official letter to the KMT’s archives requesting that it provide relevant meeting minutes within five days, said a source familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“However, the KMT requested a deadline extension, citing a need for more time to find and organize the documents,” the source said.
When asked for comment on Saturday, KMT Culture and Communications Committee deputy director Hu Wen-chi (胡文琦) said the party would handle the issue calmly and in accordance with the law.
“Nevertheless, I have to remind the illegal and unconstitutional Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee that it will only be conducting an administrative investigation, not a judicial one,” Hu said.
The KMT plans to record the entire visit, Hu said, urging the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee to take into account public perception of its actions and adhere to the ideals of procedural justice, democracy and rule of law.
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