Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday denied media reports that his wife, Tsai Ling-yi (蔡令怡), is involved in an ongoing “plot” to prevent the National Women’s League from signing an administrative contract with the government that would guarantee the league’s structural reform and the donation of assets to state coffers.
“It would not even be illegal to accept powers of attorney, but she [Tsai] has never done so,” Wu said on the sidelines of a luncheon with online media in Taipei yesterday.
Wu said Tsai has never intervened in league affairs, except during the eight years she spent heading the league’s Kaohsiung chapter when he served as the city’s mayor from 1990 to 1998.
Photo: Lin Ching-lun, Taipei Times
Wu was responding to an article published on Thursday by the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper), which quoted an anonymous senior source as saying that Tsai and three other KMT members have been collecting powers of attorney from league members in the run-up to a members’ meeting scheduled for Wednesday.
The report said the four are joining forces with a “hawkish” faction within the league led by former league chairwoman Cecilia Koo (辜嚴倬雲) to work against a “pacifist” faction headed by chairwoman Joanna Lei (雷倩), who succeeded Koo last month after the latter was removed by the Ministry of the Interior for refusing to sign the contract.
Their goal is to kill the contract at the members’ meeting, in which a decision is expected to be made on whether to sign the make-or-break contract with the ministry and the Cabinet’s Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee, the report added.
Lei on Dec. 29 signed a memorandum of understanding with the ministry and the committee, promising to ratify the contract within a month.
The contract would require the league to apply for its dissolution and donate 90 percent of the its total assets — about NT$34.3 billion (US$1.18 billion) — to state coffers for public welfare purposes, among others.
In exchange, the league would no longer face investigation or punitive measures over its alleged links to the KMT and its use of the Military Benefit Tax, a tariff levied on the US dollar value of all imported goods from 1955 to 1989 that provided most of the funding for the league’s charity work.
Meanwhile, Lei yesterday said on Facebook that “some people” were using all sorts of reasons to attack and attempt to nullify a resolution to sign the contract that was made during a meeting of the league’s standing committee last month.
“Hopefully one day, when all the archives are made public, people will understand that the standing committee members were not only trying to protect the league established by Madame Chiang [Soong Mayling (宋美齡)] ... but also to make sure its members could hold high the banner of justice and public welfare,” Lei said.
Turning to allegations that the signing of the contract has been impeded by political intervention, Lei said a reporter calling about the claims yesterday attempted in vain to put the name of a certain political party in her mouth.
“I only told her [the reporter] that as most related boards of directors have yet to hold a meeting, we have informed the interior ministry that we could not complete the procedure by the Jan. 31 deadline,” Lei said.
Assets committee spokeswoman Shih Chin-fang (施錦芳) said that if an administrative contract is not signed on Wednesday, the committee would not rule out holding a provisional meeting to discuss subsequent handling of the league’s assets in accordance with that 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).
“We have already expressed our hope that the league understands the values of transitional justice,” Shih said.
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