The National Women’s League on Monday last week approved transitioning into a political party to prevent being dissolved under provisions of the Political Parties Act (政黨法), people familiar with the matter said yesterday.
According to amendments passed in 2017, politically oriented civil groups established in compliance with the Civil Associations Act (人民團體法) prior to the changes must revise their charters and transition into a political party by Dec. 17 or be dissolved.
To meet the requirements, the group’s standing committee held a meeting at which a lawyer explained that transitioning would be the only way to keep the organization alive, a branch member said.
Photo: Chen Yu-fu, Taipei Times
While the committee voted in favor of the transition, the group still has to revise its charter and approve the changes at a national convention before submitting an application to the Ministry of the Interior, the sources said.
If the group is to transition into a political party, National Women’s League chairwoman Joanna Lei (雷倩) is expected to become the new party’s chairwoman, the sources said.
To prevent opposition from branch organizations, headquarters has offered extensive subsidies, including a Dragon Boat Festival payment of up to NT$500,000 (US$15,863), the sources said.
Under former National Women’s League chairwoman Cecilia Koo (辜嚴倬雲), headquarters did not have close ties with its branches, a branch member said, adding that it provided minimal financial support, but had great power over them.
Branches often had to fund their own events, despite having to share the credit with headquarters, the members said.
For example, Kaohsiung branch real estate was jointly purchased by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Den-yih’s (吳敦義) wife, Tsai Ling-yi (蔡令怡), and branch members, the member said.
Although headquarters did not contribute any money, the real estate was frozen and confiscated by the Executive Yuan’s Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee along with other assets, they said.
This was why some branch members opposed signing an administrative contract with the ministry, which forces drastic structural reforms, the member said.
Headquarters’ decision to distribute subsidies was clearly an attempt to lobby support for the transition into a political party, but even with subsidies for rice dumplings and Dragon Boat Festival events, branches might not vote for Lei as party chairwoman at the national convention, the member said.
The assets committee in February last year declared the National Women’s League to be a KMT-affiliated organization, froze its assets and began investigating its financial records.
Following investigations spanning a year, the assets committee in March ordered that holdings totaling NT$38.8 billion be confiscated, leaving the group with about NT$246 million.
The group appealed the decision and the Supreme Administrative Court on May 15 ordered that the assets should not be confiscated until it reaches a decision.
However, as the assets committee’s order remains in place, the funds are still frozen.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,