The Executive Yuan’s Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee is scheduled to hold a public hearing today on the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) acquisition of assets formerly owned by the Japanese colonial government through a method called “transfer and appropriation” (轉帳撥用).
The KMT is believed to have used the method to transfer ownership of “special national properties” to the party or to appropriate them for the party’s use.
The assets in question include prime real estate in Taipei, such as the lands housing the Okura Prestige Taipei hotel on Nanjing E Road, the Taiwan Cooperative Bank building and the Jianguo Building on Guanqian Road, and the Cha for Tea branch on Hengyang Road.
These properties, with an estimated market value of NT$3.22 billion (US$105.6 million), were originally owned by the Japanese colonial government before they were taken over by the KMT regime.
They were registered as national assets by the then-Taiwan Provincial Public Property Management Office between 1950 and 1951, and were later registered under the KMT in 1960 via the “transfer and appropriation” method.
A year after acquiring the four properties, the KMT sold them to a third party, making a handsome profit without spending a dime, a committee member said.
The member added that the land housing the Cha for Tea branch was first sold to a KMT-affiliated company before being resold to the tea chain in 2003.
The committee has listed 458 “special national properties” — totaling more than 730,000m2 — that were either expropriated by the then-KMT government or transferred to a third party. Their combined value is estimated to be at least NT$9.2 billion.
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) empowers the committee to investigate, retroactively confiscate and return or restore to rightful owners all assets that were improperly obtained by the KMT and its affiliated organizations since Aug. 15, 1945 — when Japan officially announced its surrender to the Allies, bringing World War II to an end.
The act also stipulates that the committee can recover money from the sale of former national properties if they were acquired by the KMT at an “unreasonable price.”
It is expected that the committee can recover about NT$1.24 billion from the 458 properties, but the actual amount will depend on the results of negotiations.
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