Former National Women’s League chairwoman Cecilia Koo (辜嚴倬雲) yesterday said her daughter had only been retrieving personal belongings from her office, after the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee questioned Koo’s third-oldest daughter in connection with the league’s missing financial records.
The committee on Feb. 1 declared that the league is a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) affiliate, after the league’s representatives voted not to sign a government-proposed administrative contract.
The contract would have seen the league voluntarily dissolve itself and donate 90 percent of its total assets, or about NT$34.3 billion (US$1.17 billion), to state coffers.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
The committee has since summoned several league officials for questioning, including Cecilia Koo’s third daughter, Koo Huai-ju (辜懷如).
Koo Huai-ju called a news conference in the late afternoon in Taipei and issued a written statement authored by her mother.
In the statement, Cecilia Koo said she told Koo Huai-ju early last year to collect her personal belongings from the league’s headquarters and denied ever ordering league employees to hide or destroy records.
She said she went to the US in October last year for a medical procedure and two of her daughters kept her company.
During the trip, she told her daughters to dispose all of her belongings at the office, save for objects of sentimental value to them, she said.
“It is accurate that … [Koo] Huai-ju, under my instructions, dealt with the personal effects that I asked her to remove from my office at the National Women’s League,” she wrote.
However, she said she had never instructed her colleagues at the league to remove “any non-personal items” and that she had not “given orders or instructions” about the handling of league records “since the end of last year.”
Cecilia Koo added that her decision to not want to have anything to do with the league was informed by the controversies surrounding it, the death of her youngest son, as well as personal health issues and mental exhaustion, all of which occurred last year.
“As I did not want to see or hear anything related to the affairs of the league, I repeatedly told my daughter that she should, at her earliest convenience, go to the league and pack my belongings, which had accumulated over the years that I had worked for the league,” she said.
Koo was on Dec. 22 last year removed by the Ministry of the Interior after she refused to sign the contract and was later succeeded by Joanna Lei (雷倩).
Assets committee spokeswoman Shih Chin-fang (施錦芳) yesterday confirmed that the committee questioned Koo Huai-ju, league deputy secretary-general Nancy Nee (汲宇荷), Cecilia Koo’s secretary, surnamed Lee (李), and accountants and treasurers for the organization.
They were questioned as part of the committee’s probe into the disappearance of all of the league’s financial records before 2006.
The missing documents include records of the league’s use of the Military Benefit Tax, a tariff levied on the US dollar value of all imported goods from 1955 to 1989 that provided most of the funding for the league’s charity work, she said.
The committee is focusing its inquiry on verifying the available records and recovering the records that predate 2006, Shih said, adding that more of the league’s personnel could be summoned if the committee deems it necessary.
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