The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee plans to “retrieve” a Taipei office space purchased by the Chinese Association for Relief and Ensuing Services (CARES) using “unreasonable” subsidies provided to it by the Legislative Yuan, a committee member said.
CARES was formerly known as the Free China Relief Association (FCRA), which was founded in 1949 by Soong Mayling (宋美齡) and other top Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) members to conduct relief work for refugees from mainland China and promote anti-communist psychological warfare, a committee investigation showed.
Its first chairperson was Ku Cheng-kang (谷正綱).
Photo: Chen Yu-fu, Taipei Times
The FCRA used the state-owned Qingdao House I (青島一館) in Taipei as an office free of charge for many years, and later shared the building with the Taiwan chapter of the World League for Freedom and Democracy (WLFD), an organization founded in 1966 by Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), the investigation showed.
In 1990, as the Legislative Yuan was experiencing a severe shortage of office space, it reached out to the FCRA about “borrowing” Qingdao House I, the committee said, adding that from 1991 on, the Legislative Yuan began paying the FCRA — which changed its name in 1991 to the China Relief Association —about NT$20 million (US$664,019 at the current exchange rate) per year to “rent” the building.
The legislature planned on returning Qingdao House I to the association after the Legislative Yuan moved into a new home on the site of what is now the Huashan 1914 Creative Park, it said.
However, that relocation plan was later scrapped and the legislature continued to use Qingdao House I.
Given that the legislature was going to need the building for an extended period, the China Relief Association in 1998 asked it to pay three years’ rent up front, the committee said.
The association received a total of NT$260 million in rent and other subsidies between 1991 and 1996, including NT$160.45 million in relocation fees and rent, and more than NT$100 million in rent between 1997 and 1998, plus the three years’ rent paid in 1998, according to the committee’s calculations.
It used that money to rent the KMT’s Chong Sheng Building (崇聖大樓) to use as its office, said a committee member, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The China Relief Association, which became CARES in 2000, was not and is not a government agency, but used a state-owned office building free of charge over an extended period, the source said.
To get the China Relief Association to agree to relocate from Qingdao House I, the Legislative Yuan had to “help pay its rent” every year, they said.
To end this “unreasonable expenditure,” the Legislative Yuan in 1999 budgeted “an even more unreasonable sum” of NT$68.95 million to subsidize the association’s purchase of a space in the Yu Min Building (裕民大廈) for use as its permanent office, they said.
The purchase cost NT$174.5 million, the investigation showed.
To encourage the WLFD to leave Qingdao House I, the Legislative Yuan budgeted about NT$64 million to subsidize the league’s purchase of office space on another floor of the Yu Min Building, the investigation found.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs subsidized the WLFD, but stopped several years ago, the source said.
The committee is to discuss how to retrieve public subsidies given to the WLFD, they said.
As for the building and office space in New Taipei City now owned by CARES, if they were purchased using public subsidies, the committee would also try to retrieve them, they added.
Additional reporting by other staff writers
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