For the past few weeks, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and its Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) have been embroiled in a series of scandals related to irregularities in their presidential campaign financial reporting. These scandals continue to expand as more evidence surfaces, raising more questions about the party’s financial propriety and competency.
These irregularities include unusually high spending, allegedly accepting donations from abroad, reporting 97.3 percent of personal donations as “cash,” making large payments to marketing firms with close ties to the party and accounting errors.
When the financial irregularities were first reported, the party blamed it on “arbitrary misconduct” by their accountant Tuanmu Cheng (端木正). However, later they blamed their chief financial officer Lee Wen-tsung (李文宗) for mismanagement. The two were expelled from the party on Tuesday last week.
TPP Legislator Vivian Huang (黃珊珊), Ko’s campaign manager, was also blamed by some party members for her poor supervision.
Huang called the irregularities in their financial reporting “unimaginable errors,” but she was only suspended from her party positions and is now tasked with dealing with the aftermath.
Throughout the crisis, Ko has denied knowing anything about the seriously flawed financial records, despite the Control Yuan having confirmed that it received Ko’s campaign financial report on April 7 and returned it the next day due to an obvious discrepancy.
Ko did not apologize until Friday, and only said he should not have “trusted a classmate who I have known for 50 years,” using Lee, who was Ko’s high-school classmate, to deflect any responsibility.
However, while Ko has used Tuanmu, Lee and Huang to insulate his reputation from the financial disclosure scandals, his wife, Peggy Chen (陳佩琪), unwittingly added fuel to the political firestorm.
On Facebook, Chen said she registered a company in her son’s name to open a coffee shop for the “little grasses” (小草, Ko’s younger supporters). However, after Ko said they only gave their son money to register his own business, Chen later deleted the Facebook post and changed her statement to align it with Ko’s.
To make matters worse, local Chinese-language media reported on Tuesday that Chen recently visited, with a view to possibly buying, a NT$120 million (US$3.75 million) luxury apartment in Taipei, leading to speculation about how the family could afford it.
At a time when the TPP is facing intense scrutiny over its opaque financial dealings, accusations of mismanagement, and allegations about false reporting and fraud, the visit did not help Ko in his efforts to project a clean image to the public.
As the central bank stipulates that banks can only grant a maximum mortgage of 40 percent of the total price for luxury housing units (above NT$80 million in Taipei), Ko would need to have more than NT$70 to be able to afford the apartment Chen visited. However, Ko’s personal financial disclosure report last year showed the couple had only about NT$24.6 million in savings.
Ko has often said that he lacks funding, and was forced to put his home up for collateral to secure a NT$20 million loan to fund his 2018 mayoral re-election.
He has also called for “housing justice” to win support from young people.
Many pundits have said that Chen’s luxury apartment search might damage Ko’s reputation more than the scandals, as it contradicts the image he presents to the public and the values he claims to hold.
They say that it would be more deeply felt by his younger supporters, who are likely struggling to buy a home for themselves and might now be wondering where their donations to the TPP ended up.
A gap appears to be emerging between Washington’s foreign policy elites and the broader American public on how the United States should respond to China’s rise. From my vantage working at a think tank in Washington, DC, and through regular travel around the United States, I increasingly experience two distinct discussions. This divergence — between America’s elite hawkishness and public caution — may become one of the least appreciated and most consequential external factors influencing Taiwan’s security environment in the years ahead. Within the American policy community, the dominant view of China has grown unmistakably tough. Many members of Congress, as
The Hong Kong government on Monday gazetted sweeping amendments to the implementation rules of Article 43 of its National Security Law. There was no legislative debate, no public consultation and no transition period. By the time the ink dried on the gazette, the new powers were already in force. This move effectively bypassed Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. The rules were enacted by the Hong Kong chief executive, in conjunction with the Committee for Safeguarding National Security — a body shielded from judicial review and accountable only to Beijing. What is presented as “procedural refinement” is, in substance, a shift away from
Taiwan no longer wants to merely manufacture the chips that power artificial intelligence (AI). It aims to build the software, platforms and services that run on them. Ten major AI infrastructure projects, a national cloud computing center in Tainan, the sovereign language model Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine, five targeted industry verticals — from precision medicine to smart agriculture — and the goal of ranking among the world’s top five in computing power by 2040: The roadmap from “Silicon Island” to “Smart Island” is drawn. The question is whether the western plains, where population, industry and farmland are concentrated, have the water and
The shifting geopolitical tectonic plates of this year have placed Beijing in a profound strategic dilemma. As Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) prepares for a high-stakes summit with US President Donald Trump, the traditional power dynamics of the China-Japan-US triangle have been destabilized by the diplomatic success of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in Washington. For the Chinese leadership, the anxiety is two-fold: There is a visceral fear of being encircled by a hardened security alliance, and a secondary risk of being left in a vulnerable position by a transactional deal between Washington and Tokyo that might inadvertently empower Japan
RSS