Chinese-language Next Magazine yesterday reported that Lee Chia-feng (李佳芬), the wife of Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), allegedly evaded taxes totalling NT$818,000 (US$26,806 at the current exchange rate) in 2011 after underreporting her capital gains from a home sale by NT$4.4 million.
Ye Yuan-zhi (葉元之), the spokesman for Han’s campaign headquarters, yesterday denied that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate’s wife had evaded taxes.
Lee’s accountant had calculated the taxes differently from the National Taxation Bureau, Ye said.
Photo: Hsu Li-chuan, Taipei Times
Lee in 2007 purchased a pre-sale luxury apartment with a plot of land in New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋) for nearly NT$40 million, Next Magazine said.
In March 2010, just 15 days after she registered the apartment and land in her name, she sold them for NT$58 million, the magazine said.
When declaring her taxes for that year, Lee underreported her capital gains from the home sale by NT$4.4 million, and was later required by the National Taxation Bureau of the Central Area to pay back NT$818,000 for the home sale and other missed taxes, as well as a fine of NT$409,000, it said.
The case went to court, but eventually Lee lost after the Supreme Administrative Court overruled her appeal in 2016, it said.
Asked about the report, Ye said that what Lee encountered was “just something that ordinary people have to deal with.”
“It was definitely not evading taxes,” he said, adding that any attempt to portray the case as such would be an injustice.
The bureau did not inform Lee that she had paid her taxes incorrectly until five or six year after she declared them, he said.
Lee appealed the decision because her accountant believed that the bureau calculated the taxes according to new regulations implemented after Lee first declared them, Ye said.
If what Lee did should be described as evading taxes, then President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) brother would be worse, he said.
Tsai’s brother purchased fake recipes and was fined more than NT$10 million for it, Ye said.
“That is what you should call deliberately evading taxes,” he said.
Asked if Lee was engaging in speculative real-estate investments, having sold her Banciao home just 15 days after registering it in her name, Ye said that members of the public would make their own judgements.
“Every housing purchase and sale by Han and Lee has already been released,” he added.
Han’s campaign office on Nov. 16 released a list of six homes that the couple purchased after reports that they bought multiple homes.
Of the six homes, five have bee sold, including the Banciao apartment, which appeared to be the only profitable deal the couple made.
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