Two Taipei City councilors yesterday accused the city government of blocking an investigative committee’s access to classified documents on controversial city development projects.
Taipei City councilors Ho Chih-wei (何志偉) and Wang Min-sheng (王閔生) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that a review of the records of documents accessed by the Clean Government Committee showed that they did not include any classified documents.
The committee has been charged by Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) with investigating several city development projects from past municipal administrations, including the Taipei Dome, the proposed Taipei Twin Towers, the Taipei New Horizon (臺北文創) complex, Syntrend Creative Park (三創園區) and MeHAS City (美河市).
Wang said the committee’s lack of access to the documents raised questions about whether it would be able to conduct thorough investigations of the disputed projects.
The councilors had asked the city departments to compile a list of the titles of all classified documents related to the five projects, along with the reasons for their classification.
The city list covers a broad range of 38 documents, including coordination plans for the Taipei Dome site, operation plans for the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, which the Taipei New Horizon complex anchors, as well as meeting records for the Taipei Twin Towers project’s review commission and application records for the Syntrend Creative Park.
Wang questioned whether the list of classified documents provided by the city was complete.
He said the city bureaucracy was at best “passive” in providing a list of classified documents and at worst “actively” seeking to avoid scrutiny by failing to provide a full list of available documents.
All 16 classified documents for the Taipei Dome project were related to other government agencies, while the list of classified meeting records was incomplete, with no explanation as to why only certain meetings were listed.
On Wednesday, Hung Chi-kune (洪智坤), a close assistant and adviser to Ko, said that more than 300 documents related to the Q Square development project at the Taipei Railway Station had been marked as “destroyed” (銷毀) in city records, only to “reappear” after Ko blew a fuse over the matter.
Hsu Yu-liang (許有良), an official with the Taipei Department of Government Ethics — which is charged with assisting the Clean Government Committee in completing its duties — said that while committee members are free to view any classified documents, they are not permitted to make copies, which is why there are no records of classified documents that they have reviewed.
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