The local press has been dominated by the multiple unfolding scandals, financial crisis, arrests and revelations coming out coming out in a such a steady stream that since August 6 every day usually features multiple disastrous breaking news stories that are at best hugely embarrassing for the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and most of their top figures. There is so much going on, much not making it into the English language press, that the first three parts of this series only details the catastrophes pummeling the party up to August 17. To catch up on this train wreck of a story, search for “Donovan’s Deep Dives Ko Wen-je” in a search engine.
SURPRISE APPOINTMENT, AUG. 18
In the financial filings scandal, TPP chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) wanted to get this giant mess behind him and the party. That was not going to be easy, however.
Photo: Lo Pei-de, Taipei Times
On Ko’s birthday, Aug. 6, former employee and expelled TPP party member Grace Woo (吳靜怡) got her revenge by revealing to the public that the TPP’s financial filings for Ko’s presidential campaign had giant holes in it. Since then, it also came to light that many of the entries were questionable, with huge listings for inexpensive items, phantom taxi rides and some large deals with companies closely associated with the TPP.
On Aug. 12, the party admitted that there were 17 major mistaken entries worth NT$18.17 million, but blamed the entire mess on outside accountant Tuanmu Cheng (端木正). This obvious passing of the buck did not appease the public, so legislator and campaign head Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) resigned from the TPP’s Central Standing Committee to take responsibility. But she refused calls for her to step down from her legislative seat.
Then, four people from companies closely associated with the TPP were arrested, interrogated and released with three on bail and one without bail.
Questions, revelations and accusations continued to roll in. On Aug. 17, a Taipei city councillor alleged that personal cash remittance donations to the party were improperly listed as cash donations, something that Ko admitted had happened the following day.
Also on Aug. 17, Woo alleged on Facebook that Ko had ordered secret bank accounts to be set up for cash donations, that there had been 31 donations of exactly NT$99,999 and that in total the accounts had over the course of three months held just shy of NT$200 million. That amount seems improbable for cash donations, however, but she also alleged that Ko and Huang held “secret” meetings in hotels to solicit corporate donations.
On Aug. 18, Ko announced the TPP would initiate four reform mechanisms to prevent political donation disclosure errors and promptly deal with any future incidents. Ko said that first, the party would reinstate a “financial supervision committee,” which was not operating during the presidential election campaign.
Reinstate!? Who was responsible for disbanding it? Was Ko or Huang responsible for this recklessly irresponsible decision?
Second, the party should have “long-term cooperation with a group of lawyers.” Third, the TPP should re-establish a “response task force,” which it used to have, Ko stated, adding that how the party has handled the recent accusations is “out of tune.” Again, whose hairbrained decision was it to axe this in the first place?
That two of the “reforms” were re-instating things that should never have been axed in the first place got surprisingly little play in the local press. But they did have a field day with Ko’s next announcement on who was going to head up these reform mechanisms: Vivian Huang. Yes, you read that correctly, Ko chose the campaign manager who had already fallen on her sword to take responsibility for this mess.
He also said they were “not ruling out” holding daily press conferences to update the public on their progress.
That same day, both Ko and his former right-hand person Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如), who is currently working in Taichung as a government consultant, attended a youth entrepreneur forum held at a sausage factory in Tainan. Though they sat next to each other, when asked if they had discussed the political situation, Tsai frostily and improbably responded that she “does not discuss politics on non-working days,” strongly suggesting their relationship is still strained.
PEGGY CHEN AGAIN, AUG. 19
On Aug. 19, Huang once again apologized at the first of the promised press conferences, saying the party’s presidential election campaign financial report had “serious accounting flaws” and “unimaginable errors” in the data. She then went on to give some examples, such as NT$56,000 payment to buy honey, which was incorrectly logged as NT$5,600 and reiterated some of the party’s explanations for entries that had previously come to light.
Huang said they also found about 70 to 80 receipts, certificates or remittance records of expenditures that were not declared, which include NT$29,600 used for making mugs, NT$32,761 for making socks, NT$18,810 for a software fee, as well as meal, taxi, parking and transportation fees.
Then a whole new scandal broke. A former head of the TPP’s Hsinchu office revealed that Ko’s wife, the well-known Peggy Chen (陳佩琪) had visited a luxury apartment valued at NT$120 million located near the Legislative Yuan in July.
Chen responded that her son was 30 and she wanted him to get married, so she was apartment hunting “everywhere” in Taipei. Ko, when asked about it, gave an exasperated response of “my god, she was just looking.”
I thought this story would soon go away because window shopping for things we can not afford is hardly a strange phenomenon when looking for something to buy, like checking out a sports car at a dealership, but in the end choosing a car that we have the budget to actually afford. My analysis was totally wrong this time.
HUANG SUSPENDED AND MORE “SECRET MEETINGS,” AUG. 20
Local news magazine Mirror Media (鏡周刊) on Aug. 20 released two bombshell pieces, which if true would be very damaging to the TPP. The first was that in April, the Control Yuan had already returned the accounting records submitted by the TPP pointing to irregularities of NT$20 million, and asked the party to account for this and resubmit their filing.
If this report is true, that means that the top people in the TPP knew back then that things were seriously wrong and have been lying about being caught flat-footed this August. Initially Ko said “I don’t know” when asked about it, but then the TPP vehemently denied the NT$20 million number on their Web site and stated the resubmission request was over far more minor issues. It then threatened to sue Mirror Media.
Mirror Media is standing by their reporting on this, and the reports are still up on their site as well as reports referencing it by other news outlets. However, their credibility took a serious hit with their second bombshell report that prosecutors had raided Huang’s office.
They were right that a lawmaker’s office had been raided, but it actually the office of Tainan lawmaker Lin I-chin (林宜瑾) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). She is being accused of basically the same crime that got former TPP Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao (高虹安) sentenced for corruption on July 26: pilfering funding intended to pay assistants.
Also on Aug. 20, political commentator Lee Cheng-hao (李正皓) expanded on the allegation he made a few days earlier that Ko, Huang and others had had a “secret” “Zero Day” March 10, 2020 meeting on the Core Pacific City Mall case that is at the center of a corruption investigation, and alleged that Ko used a citizen petition written by Core Pacific to urge the city’s Urban Development Bureau to approve a massive expansion of the project’s allowable floor space.
SET News was able to confirm that Ko, then Deputy Mayor Vivian Huang and Taipei City Councillor Angela Ying (應曉薇) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) were all in the meeting, though Ko and the TPP took issue with it being characterized as “secret” as it was on record.
Lee was now claiming three meetings took place, with the two additional ones being held on April 21 and Aug. 10 in 2020. He claimed that Ko and Huang were in all three meetings, but that it was only in the third meeting that another deputy mayor, Pong Cheng-sheng (彭振聲) joined in. Pong was picked up and interrogated by prosecutors on Aug. 12 on suspicion of corruption in this case, and he is barred from leaving the country while the investigation is ongoing.
Meanwhile, after a previously indecisive meeting, the TPP’s Central Review Committee released their decision to suspend Huang’s party membership for three years. This means that she remains a party member, but can not participate in certain party functions, including making another run for Taipei mayor under the banner of the TPP.
Maintaining her party membership does mean she retains her legislative seat, however. The review committee also decided to expel Lee Wen-tsung (李文宗), who was the finance chief for Ko’s election campaign office, and Tuanmu Cheng.
So, one day after Ko put Huang in charge of reforming the party, the party suspends her membership. Makes sense, right?
On the same day, Peggy Chen faced a disciplinary committee examining another issue that surfaced earlier this month, that she used her son’s name to register a company and bank account. At the time, she was a director at a hospital and barred from registering a company because she was a civil servant at the time.
Depending on the expert, her actions may or may not have been illegal, but neither this committee nor prosecutors seemed to have any appetite to follow up on that.
Stick around for this series, amazingly things are going to get a whole lot worse.
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