The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus yesterday accused the Presidential Office of issuing contradictory statements about its visitor records and said the Democratoc Progressive Party (DPP) is running a smear campaign against the KMT in connection with a scandal at state-owned banks implicating Ching Fu Shipbuilding Co.
The Presidential Office on Wednesday told a “blatant lie” when it said that there were no records of Ching Fu president Chen Ching-nan (陳慶男) or his son, Ching Fu vice president Chen Wei-chih (陳偉志), visiting office officials, only to contradict itself later that day, the caucus said.
The caucus also cast doubt on back-to-back statements by the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office issued on Wednesday night, which it said echoed the Presidential Office’s statements.
Photo courtesy of Wu Den-yih
After the Presidential Office on Wednesday morning said that it could not find any visitor records for Chen Ching-nan or his son, the prosecutors’ office issued a statement saying that Chen Wei-chih “claimed to have visited the Presidential Office to gain the trust of the Kaohsiung Marine Bureau,” which allegedly helped the shipbuilder secure land in Kaohsiung’s Singda Harbor.
However, it later said that Chen Wei-chih had “visited the Presidential Office once,” just two hours after the Presidential Office’s ongoing investigation into its guest records showed that Chen Ching-nan and his son had visited then-New Southbound Policy Office director James Huang (黃志芳) and Presidential Office Third Bureau Director David Lee (李南陽).
“The Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office and the Presidential Office are either schizophrenic or colluding with each other,’ KMT caucus deputy secretary-general Lee Yen-hsiu (李彥秀) told a news conference at the legislature.
Photo: Laio Chen-huei, Taipei Times
The Presidential Office should be completely honest when explaining its role in the case, rather than only divulging a small amount of information when pressed to do so; otherwise, it would be “digging its own grave,” Lee Yen-hsiu said.
What matters is not how many times Chen Ching-nan and Chen Wei-chih visited the Presidential Office, but whether any of the visits led to the navy’s expedited payment of NT$2.4 billion (US$79.6 million at the current exchange rate) to Ching Fu, she said, urging the DPP to stop its “smear campaign” against the KMT.
Presidential Office spokesman Sidney Lin (林鶴明) said that Chen Ching-nan and Chen Wei-chih together had paid six visits to the Presidential Office, five of which took place before Tsai took office.
KMT Legislator Ma Wen-chun (馬文君) dismissed the prosecuters’ office’s statement that Ching Fu could sue the navy if it had not received the payment last year, saying that the contract between the navy and Ching Fu forbids the shipbuilder to sue over undue payments.
KMT Legislator Lu Yu-ling (呂玉玲) said the Presidential Office had first interfered in the budgeting procedure, then proceeded to influence the judiciary, adding that this has caused the public to lose faith in the prosecutors’ office integrity in the Ching Fu case.
Separately, KMT Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said in an interview that the “five meetings Chen Ching-nan and his son had with the KMT cannot compare to the one they had with Huang, which resulted in the navy’s immediate disbursement of funds.”
Wu cited a photograph of Tsai (蔡英文) shaking hands with Chen Ching-nan during a marine drill in Keelung in June, which he said showed the two had a close relationship.
“Huang had nothing to do with the NT$2.4 billion payment,” the Presidential Office said, dismissing Wu’s remarks
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