Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is due in the Taipei District Court today to be questioned about his involvement in the contracting process for the Taipei Dome build-operate-transfer (BOT) project when he was Taipei mayor.
The Taipei City Government in 2004 named Farglory Group and Osaka-based Takenaka Corp as contractors for the project after selective bidding was conducted, saying they were the most qualified applicants.
After Takenaka pulled out of the project in September of that year, Farglory continued to negotiate a contract with the city government, and a BOT contract was signed in 2006.
The contract exempted Farglory from paying royalties on the complex — which according to the approved construction plan was to consist of a baseball stadium, movie theater, department store, hotel and office building — over the 50 year-term of the contract, sparking speculation that Ma and former Taipei Department of Finance commissioner Lee Sush-der (李述德), who presided over the negotiations, could have colluded with Farglory and improperly helped it.
Prosecutors who investigated the case said the waiving of royalties would cost the city about NT$400 million (US$13.2 million at the current exchange rate) per year for the duration of the contract.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) clean government committee in 2015 asked the Ministry of Justice to investigate Ma and Lee, citing a recording that indicated that Lee, during a 2004 meeting, said “top brass” at the city government instructed him to waive the royalties after “the Farglory chairman met with the mayor and reached consensuses.”
The ministry forwarded the case to the ministry’s Special Investigation Division (SID), which passed it on to the court because Ma was Taipei mayor at the time the negotiations took place.
Members of the Songshan Tobacco Factory Tree Protection Union, the leading civic group opposing the Dome project, accused the Ma administration of tipping off Farglory about qualifications for the selective bidding, while only notifying other competitors about the terms a few days before the application window closed.
The union in 2015 filed suit against Ma and Lee, asking the courts, the SID, the Control Yuan and the Agency Against Corruption to probe possible malpractice during the contracting process.
Ma’s office spokeswoman Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) said that Ma is confident of his innocence in the case and denied that the waiving of royalties was against the law.
The court declined to comment on whether it would also question Ma over the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) sales of Central Motion Picture Co, the Broadcasting Corp of China and China Television in 2006, when he was president and chairman of the KMT.
Ma has been accused of giving instructions to sell the former state-run companies at vastly undervalued prices.
Additional reporting by Chien Li-chung and Shih Hsiao-kuang
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