Whether office items retrieved by former National Women’s League chairwoman Cecilia Koo’s (辜嚴倬雲) daughter were indeed all personal effects has devolved into a he-said-she-said situation, with the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee yesterday maintaining that the location where the league supposedly stored its financial records was found empty.
A source with knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity, said that after asking the league to hand over archives and financial documents predating 2006, the committee received an overview listing the league’s account books, archives and financial records that were relocated in May last year.
However, when committee staff followed league employees’ instructions and inspected a unit within a residential building on Taipei’s Dehui Street, it had already been emptied, a committee member said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.
Photo: Chen Yu-fu, Taipei Times
The committee member said that testimony provided by a dozen league employees the committee had questioned so far — including league deputy secretary-general Nancy Nee (汲宇荷), the driver who helped deliver the documents and league staff who packed the records — all pointed to the league’s official documents being sent to Koo’s residence.
Citing as proof remarks on Facebook earlier yesterday mader by league chairwoman Joanna Lei (雷倩), the committee member said that if all the items were personal effects, as Koo claimed, Lei would not have been concerned that documents that could help the league refute the committee’s accusations might have been destroyed.
“How could the league’s documents and account books be personal effects?” the committee member asked. “And how could personal effects be used to disprove the committee’s accusations?”
Later yesterday, committee spokeswoman Shih Chin-fang (施錦芳) said that Koo’s family hired two trucks to deliver items stored in another unit in the Dehui Street building to the committee yesterday afternoon.
“Most of the items are personal items belonging to Koo, while a small portion are letters and books belonging to Soong Mayling (蔣宋美齡),” Shih said, adding that committee staff was still going through the items.
Soong, Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) wife, established the league in 1950 and led it for decades.
Lei made the remarks one day after Koo’s third-youngest daughter, Koo Huai-ju (辜懷如), held a news conference in Taipei, at which she released a statement by her mother, who maintained she had only instructed her daughter to retrieve “personal items” from her old office.
“After being listed as a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-affiliate, in addition to taking legal action, another challenge is to present evidence within four months proving that the league’s assets are not party assets,” Lei said on Facebook. “However, the documents we still have at hand can only be described as unbelievably fragmentary.”
Lei said that a photograph of the empty location was on Thursday shown to league staff by the committee and this, coupled with Koo Huai-ju’s news conference, made her suspicous.
“Could the piles of documents boxed last year, which might have included records that could be used to refute the committee’s accusations, have mostly been shredded?” Lei asked.
Koo on Dec. 22 last year was removed from her position by the Ministry of the Interior and succeeded by Lei after she refused to sign a government-proposed administrative contract.
However, despite the leadership change, representatives of the league’s members on Jan. 31 voted against signing the contract, prompting the committee to list it as a KMT affiliate the following day.
The contract would have seen the league voluntarily dissolve itself and donate 90 percent of its total assets, or about NT$34.3 billion (US$1.17 billion), to state coffers.
In exchange, the committee would have dropped its investigation into the league’s alleged links with 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.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching