A pundit and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) spokesman yesterday said that Sunday’s election of city and county council speakers were tainted by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) ties to organized crime.
Among the six major cities, in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan and Taichung, councilors elected KMT members as speakers and deputy speakers shortly after their inaugurations.
Only councils in Tainan and Kaohsiung leaned toward the DPP for those positions.
Photo: Lee Hui-chou, Taipei Times
Kaohsiung City Councilor Tseng Chun-chieh (曾俊傑) on Saturday quit the KMT due to intra-party disputes, saying he would sit as an independent and courted DPP Kaohsiung City Councilor Kang Yu-cheng (康裕成) for needed votes for the deputy speaker’s job.
From Sunday’s selection of speaker’s positions, the KMT holds 15 council speaker offices while the DPP holds four, and three speakers hold no party affiliation. Fifteen speakers are incumbents, while seven are newly elected.
The KMT holds 14 deputy speaker positions, while the DPP has two and the People First Party has one. Five deputy speakers are without party affiliation.
Author and political pundit Wang Hao (汪浩) said that nearly every KMT speaker and deputy speaker with alleged ties to organized crime were re-elected to their positions.
Those include KMT members in Taipei, Taichung, Taoyuan, Hsinchu City, Nantou County and Yunlin County, Wang said.
“Taipei City Council Deputy Speaker Yeh Lin-chuan (葉林傳) and Taichung Coucil Deputy Speaker Yen Li-min (顏莉敏) are members of prominent local families connected to gang members with criminal convictions,” Wang said.
A number of KMT members in top city and council positions have been convicted of assault, intimidation, and gang-related crime, he added.
“Hsinchu City Deputy Speaker Hsu Hsiu-juei (許修睿) was a gangster leading a local chapter of the Four Seas Gang. Hsu served a six-month sentence for blackmail and extortion while colluding with other gangsters in a garbage landfill business in 1999, and also sentenced to a suspended one-year term for gang-related criminal activities in 2004,” Wang said.
Nantou County Council Speaker Ho Sheng-feng (何勝豐) and Deputy Speaker Pan Yi-chuan (潘一全), both of the KMT, have connections with gang members, he said.
Ho was charged with blackmail, vote-buying, arson and other offenses, while Pan had been arrested for uttering threats against local elected officials in 1999 and violent intimidation in 2000, in efforts to obtain a construction contract relating to earthquake rebuilding programs, Wang said.
“KMT Taoyuan City Council Speaker Chiu Yi-sheng (邱奕勝) was found guilty of corruption in 2014, which was upheld on appeal, and sentenced to a nine-year term,” he said.
“Lee Hsiao-chung (李曉鐘) was convicted of buying votes during a 1994 election for top Taoyuan council offices, receiving a suspended sentence of one year,” Wang said.
The often fierce contests for top council jobs are in pursuit of the speaker’s power on decisionmaking, which includes approval of local construction projects and allocation of public funds, he said.
The annual central government transfer of NT$1 trillion (US$32.56 billion), to local city and county councils for public projects is a “pig trough” that is often used for shady deals and cronyism, Wang said.
DPP spokesman Hsieh Tzu-han (謝子涵) yesterday addressed the issue in a statement.
“Using the KMT’s majority in most local councils, the party had enough success to elect speakers and deputy speakers tainted by organized crime connections,” Hsieh said. “This shows that the party is deceiving the public on its promise to remove gangsters within its ranks.”
The DPP recently passed a resolution to prohibit anyone with criminal convictions or ties to organized crime from running as candidates.
“KMT officials at that time claimed they have much stronger regulations to remove gangsters, but Sunday’s council votes showed the contrary,” Hsieh said.
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