The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee has opened a new line of inquiry into the National Women’s League (NWL) regarding the acquisition of a property in Taipei’s Zhongzheng District (中正) on which its headquarters was built.
The committee has reasons to believe that the property, the most valuable real estate the league owns, was acquired by illegitimate means during the Martial Law era, a committee member said on condition of anonymity.
There are questions surrounding the lot’s multiple changes of ownership from the Nationalist Army to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Women’s Department and then to the league, they said.
The league’s purchase was funded by public donations for military veterans funneled to it by the KMT, they added.
Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) wife Soong Mayling (宋美齡) served concurrently as chairwoman of the league and the department, and the organizations had until the 1990s shared the campus of the army’s Baoqing Base (寶慶營區) in Taipei, the committee member said.
Soong filled leadership positions in both groups with the wives of top military brass in a bid to cement the armed forces’ loyalty to Chiang, they said.
According to the Ministry of National Defense’s archives, the then-Army Armor Command was the original owner of the property and the command apparently sold the lot to the KMT under Soong’s “orders,” they added.
The department bought the land in parcels from the 1960s to the 1980s, during which it apparently blocked a plan by the Taipei City Government to build a road through the lot, they said.
Although the pretext for the land purchase was to build a women’s shelter in Taipei, the department later sold the property to the league for NT$600 million (US$19.46 million at the current exchange rate), they said.
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