The legislature yesterday failed to pass a revised regulation that would have decriminalized the ill-regulated use of special allowance funds involving about 7,500 government and party officials.
The proposed revision ran into opposition from Legislator Yen Chin-piao (顏清標) of the Non--Partisan Solidarity Union (NPSU), a four-member legislative caucus, that opposed the amendment to the Accounting Act (會計法) that was initially scheduled to clear the floor yesterday with support from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Designed to resolve what both the KMT and the DPP called an -“historical glitch,” the proposed amendment stipulated that the use of the funds by government chiefs and deputy chiefs should be considered legal until the end of 2006 — with the exception of the state affairs fund used by the president.
Yen has been indicted to stand trial on charges of embezzlement and fraudulent acquisition of public money while he served as -Taichung County Council speaker from October 1998 to December 2000 in a case involving several Taichung politicians who sought to use public funds to reimburse expenses from night clubs.
KMT legislative caucus whip Lin Yi-shih (林益世) said that Yen wished to expand the scope of immunity laid out in the amendment so that he would be absolved of the charges against him.
The bill, which cleared the committee stage last week, was supposed to proceed to a second and third reading without being referred to intra-party negotiation that could take up to a month for lawmakers to reach consensus.
“We’ll see if we can resolve these disputes before the next session on Tuesday. If the NPSU insists, we could wait for a month and then schedule a date to vote on it,” Lin said.
Yen declined to comment on the matter, while Hsu Kuo-sheng (許國勝), director of his legislative office, said the motion was proposed by the NPSU not Yen personally.
Last year, Yen and Taichung Council Speaker Chang Ching-tang (張清堂), then-deputy speaker, were both sentenced to four-and-a-half-years in prison by Taiwan High Court’s Taichung Branch Court following a third trial — a ruling the Supreme Court overruled on March 17.
The Supreme Court demanded a retrial because the case qualified for a possible commutation of sentence, which the Taiwan High Court Taichung Branch Court had not considered in its ruling.
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