On Thursday last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislative caucus held a general assembly meeting, after which it published an updated version of its Report on KMT Party Assets.
Although this made good on a promise by KMT caucus whip Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆) last month for more transparency on data about the party’s assets, on closer inspection, the 23-page report is littered with problems.
First, on page 10, the report refers to the central bank’s gold reserves and attempts to include these as party funds.
However, at a recent meeting of the Finance Committee at the legislature in Taipei, central bank Governor Perng Fai-nan (彭淮南) said that the gold is the property of the Republic of China.
The KMT released a document in August 2006, titled “Facing history and providing an account to the whole of society: an explanation on party assets,” in which it tried to deceive the public by conflating state assets with party assets.
Fast forward 10 years, and the KMT is up to the same old tricks; it could certainly be said that the party had its public dressing from Perng coming. As for the party’s newly updated “Explanation on Palace Museum National Treasures,” it is even more farcical and has turned the party into a laughing stock.
Second, a statement by former KMT chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) in October last year that the party would “complete the handling of disputed party assets investigated by the Control Yuan and under the control of the Executive Yuan,” is pretty much a reoccurring theme throughout the report: good examples appear on pages 7 and 15.
However, what exactly is meant by the phrase “disputed party assets investigated by the Control Yuan and under the control of the Executive Yuan?”
The KMT has always been vague on this issue. In fact, a previous investigation carried out by the Control Yuan — the report was published in April 2001 — was restricted to the following asset classes: “transfer” to the KMT of certain kinds of state-owned real estate; the appropriation and operation of 19 theaters from the Japanese colonial era; acceptance by the party of “gifts” of local land; property and other assets; and a small number of real-estate properties.
In short, it was not a comprehensive and thorough investigation.
As for the subsequent investigation by the Executive Yuan, due to a wide variety and large number of state assets improperly obtained by the KMT over an extended period of time — and because the relevant information was widely dispersed in many different locations — the scope of the investigation was enormous.
On the basis of a report issued to the Executive Yuan by the Ministry of Finance in May 2008, asset categories including land, awards and grants, tax relief, and combined party worker and civil service length-of-service pensions totaled NT$51.9 billion (US$1.59 billion at current exchange rates).
In addition to these asset classes were so-called “special privileges” — additional financial benefits enjoyed by holders of public office. The sheer amount made the numbers difficult to estimate with accuracy. Since businesses owned and operated by the party were usually classed as “special enterprises,” information on profits was treated as sensitive financial information and kept secret. This further hampered the investigation.
Looking back at the evolution of the KMT, from the 1990s onward, the party began to move toward becoming a financial corporation and a holder of equities. The substantive core of KMT assets slowly began to be transferred from easily traceable registered land or property into a labyrinthine system of share ownership rights.
Further information on this subject is covered in detail in Andy Liang (梁永煌) and Vicky Tien’s (田習如) book Liquidating the KMT (拍賣國民黨), published in 2000, Yang Shih-jen’s (楊士仁) 2008 publication Party assets: pursuit and capture (黨產追緝令), and the author’s own 2011 book Deciphering party assets (黨產解密).
To this day, the KMT is still trying to shift the focus onto real-estate assets to deliberately confuse the public and conceal the truth.
Even though President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration took down the Executive Yuan’s Web site on ill-gotten party assets on the evening of May 19, 2008 — the day before Ma took office — and it has remained offline since, the Ministry of Finance’s official report on party assets has miraculously been preserved and is still accessible via a link on its Web site.
Is the KMT’s own report on party assets, as Democratic Progressive Party legislator Wang Ting-yu (王定宇) said, “sheer nonsense?”
Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions after comparing the contents of the two reports.
Lo Cheng-chung is an assistant professor at the Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology Institute’s of Financial and Economic Law.
Translated by Edward Jones
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