Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said that the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office was “following orders” when it decided to indict him and reassured the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Central Standing Committee that he did not undersell the party’s assets when he was party chairman.
Ma was invited by KMT Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) to address the committee regarding his sales of Central Motion Picture Corp, Broadcasting Corp of China and China Television Co (CTV).
Although the KMT on Saturday last week said in a news release that the invitation was extended as a demonstration of the party’s belief in Ma’s integrity, Wu yesterday said that the party was “not trying to fight a certain government agency, nor endorsing a specific individual.”
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
“We are simply hoping to examine the appropriateness of Ma’s handling of the companies’ sales through a fair and objective lens,” Wu said, adding that Ma, as a former KMT chairman, deserved a chance to explain his side of the story.
Ma on Tuesday last week was charged with breach of trust and contraventions of the Securities and Exchange Act (證券交易法) for his role in the KMT’s sales of several party assets in 2005 and 2006, including the three companies.
The two people who managed the KMT’s finances used an elaborate financial scheme, which Ma approved, that enabled the party to sell the media companies and other assets at below-market prices, which caused the KMT to lose NT$7.29 billion (US$238.38 million at the current exchange rate), the indictment said.
“I take full responsibility for what I say and I can assure each and every committee member that I did not undersell KMT assets when I was the party chairman,” Ma said. “Every decision was made based on my judgement of what was best for the party.”
Ma said the sales had already been scrutinized by the now-defunct Special Investigation Division, which cleared the case of any wrongdoings after an eight-year probe that questioned nearly 100 people.
That the case was reopened after the Democratic Progressive Party administration took office in 2016 and that he has been indicted reeks of political intervention, Ma said.
“I believe people’s eyes are sharp and they can know whether the prosecutors’ office was following orders when it decided to indict me,” he said.
Citing as an example the sale of KMT-run Hua Hsia Investment Holding Co’s shares in CTV to Jungli Investment Co, a subsidiary of what is now known as the Want Want China Times Group, Ma said that Jungli paid NT$892.5 million for the shares, which had a book value of about NT$700 million at the time.
“How could you call it underselling when the party sold the shares of a media company that had been in the red for years at a price that was higher than its book value?” Ma asked.
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