Ugly is a politician's shameless face when telling lies.
But none is uglier than the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) selling off its stolen assets to fund its battle to return to power.
The easy cash that the party can mobilize in support of its candidates' campaigns remains a scar on the country's democracy. It begs the question: How did the party come to have such bounteous assets to sell off in the first place?
It is no secret that the KMT has engaged in dubious actions in selling off its stolen assets. Aside from the high-profile sale of its three media assets -- China Television Co, the Broadcasting Corp of China and the Central Motion Picture Corp -- to a subsidiary of the China Times Group in December 2005 for just NT$4 billion (US$120.5 million), the party has also been attempting to secretly offload real estate around the country that it took over from the Japanese government following World War II.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration has watched the goings on and done little to stop them, despite repeated claims that it wants to reclaim the assets for the country.
The Cabinet, in a gesture aimed at proving the government's desire to reclaim the KMT's stolen assets, yesterday publicized a Web site created to provide the public with a detailed explanation of how the KMT has dealt with its holdings.
The DPP also launched a month-long campaign aimed at reclaiming the KMT's stolen assets through a referendum.
The KMT, however, has shrugged off the Cabinet's new Web site and labeled the complaints about the sales of its assets as mere politicking ahead of the year-end elections.
While the KMT's argument is clearly an attempt to confuse the public about the issue at hand, the DPP is not without blame.
After all, it is the DPP and government officials who more often than not have raised the matter of recovering the KMT's stolen assets whenever an election approaches -- and then appear to quickly forget about them once the votes are counted. It's no wonder their lack of persistence has led the public to question the party's and the government's sincerity in the matter.
We once counted on the KMT, under the leadership of former chairman Ma Ying-jeou (
More than ever, the DPP administration needs to formulate concrete measures to pre-empt the KMT's efforts to liquidate and launder its assets before it is too late.
Otherwise, it would only prove to the public that the DPP was not serious about recovering the KMT's stolen assets, and that all the talk was indeed part of an election ploy. That would be a double disservice to the nation.
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