The ongoing financial scandal of independent presidential candidate James Soong (宋楚瑜) took a new twist yesterday, this time involving a Taipei irrigation association.
Soong claimed on Saturday that he had previously declined an NT$100 million donation from the Chihsing Farmland Irrigation Association (?C星1A?ETH>?籈Q會). The money was instead used to set up a foundation named the Weilien Foundation (維譧基金會), Soong said.
Hsieh Jui-lin (謝瑞麟), the Weilien Foundation's current CEO, said yesterday that it was operating on an NT$10 million or so annual interest, and that the foundation was doing next to nothing, given that NT$3 million is spent on overheads and more than NT$6 million is spent on taxes, Hsieh said.
However, Chuang Kuang-ming (
Chuang said the association asked Soong to handle the establishment of the Weilien Foundation, and that the money was not a donation.
The association had also set up two more similar foundations during Chen Shui-bian's (
Meanwhile, officials at the Ministry of Finance confirmed that some of the money in Soong's son's account -- the main focus of the presidential candidate's recent scandal -- came from public donations. Responding to Soong's earlier claim that he was only transferring the interest from family savings in his son's Taiwan account to the US, officials at the presidential office questioned how the annual interest could have almost doubled his family savings in six years.
Transaction records revealed by KMT lawmaker Yang Chi-hsiung (楊|N雄) show that more than NT$26 million (US$800,000) was transferred to the US from the junior Soong's Taiwan account in November, 1998. Soong's camp had claimed the money was accumulated from interest incurred by the initial NT$14 million deposited in the account opened in 1991.
The finance ministry will release its investigation results on Soong's financial dealings at Wednesday's finance committee meeting, high-level officials at the ministry said yesterday.
"Whatever questions on this issue from lawmakers will be answered, including those about money flow at domestic and foreign bank accounts belonging to James Soong, his son, his sister-in-law, and more than ten close aides to him," sources said.
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