On Tuesday last week, the Control Yuan voted seven to four to impeach National Taiwan University (NTU) president Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔) for holding a side job while serving as minister, first of the now-defunct Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) and then the National Development Council, from February 2012 to February 2015.
According to the Control Yuan’s investigation, Kuan was paid NT$1.9 million (US$61,586) to write anonymous editorials for Next Magazine during this time.
This was in contravention of Article 14 of the Public Functionary Service Act (公務員服務法), which prohibits political appointees from taking paid side jobs unless otherwise allowed by law.
The Control Yuan is to submit the case to the Judicial Yuan’s Commission on the Disciplinary Sanction of Public Functionaries.
The most severe punishment available to the commission is to remove Kuan from office.
Kuan wrote anonymous editorials on a regular and long-term basis. His editorials adhered to the publisher’s position and thus he represented the magazine.
This could negatively affect the respect that his position as a political appointee should command, but there might also have been conflicts of interest, as the editorial content touched on government policy.
Kuan’s remuneration exceeded the legally stipulated monthly upper limit for side jobs — NT$50,000 is not a small sum.
It is clear that Kuan breached the rules on taking a side job, and it will be interesting to see what the Commission on the Disciplinary Sanction of Public Functionaries decides.
The controversy over Kuan’s nomination includes him serving as an independent director of Taiwan Mobile — whose vice president, Richard Tsai (蔡明興), was on NTU’s election committee — the writing of editorials for the magazine and holding a teaching position at Xiamen University in China’s Fujian Province.
While the editorials and the teaching position might seem trivial, they involve conflicts of interest for the position of university president.
Money is the common denominator of all three. Kuan might have been the chair professor in the university’s finance department, but he would not forgo the independent director paycheck, which might have been as high as NT$10 million per year, or the NT$50,000 a month for writing editorials. This reveals a certain love for money.
Interestingly, when Kuan was the final minister of the CEPD, Taiwan’s GDP was adjusted downward on three occasions, implying that the agency’s forecasts were not accurate enough.
In a shared display of anger, legislators from the government and opposition parties stripped Kuan of his NT$280,000 year-end bonus.
In response, Kuan said: “That is alright. They can take everything if they want. I am a man — why would I care?”
At the time, people thought that Kuan did not care very much about money, and although perhaps he did not think that wealth was as worthless as the dirt on your shoes, he was still seen as someone with the character of a learned man and an intellectual.
Who knows, maybe he did not care about losing the year-end bonus as he was writing editorials on the side and getting paid for it.
Chen Kuan-fu is a graduate law student at National Taipei University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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