The Taipei High Administrative Court yesterday ruled in favor of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), saying it need not pay the state the more than NT$1 billion (US$31.43 million at the current exchange rate) it made from the sale of its old party headquarters in downtown Taipei.
Yesterday’s ruling was a reversal of a decision by the same court in 2021, which stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the KMT in 2018 against the government’s Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee.
The ruling can still be appealed.
Photo: Taipei Times file
The court said the committee must withdraw its 2018 administrative order demanding that the KMT hand over the NT$1.14 billion it made from the property sale.
The KMT in March 2006 sold the site to Chang Yung-fa Foundation for NT$2.3 billion.
Set up in 2016, the committee evaluated historical records to verify that the KMT had rented the property to house its old party headquarters.
The building housed the International Red Cross during the Japanese colonial era.
Records show that after World War II, the then-KMT government placed the building under the Ministry of Finance’s National Property Administration and started renting it for its party headquarters in 1967.
When the lease expired in 1971, it did not renew the contract, but continued using the office building until it signed a new lease in 1983.
The KMT later applied and in 1990 received approval to purchase the property, for which it paid NT$77.12 million.
The KMT rebuilt the headquarters building in 1994 in preparation to sell, mainly due to pressure from former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), who served as a legislator from 1990 to 1994, and as Taipei mayor from 1994 to 1998.
During his election campaigns in the early 1990s, Chen hammered the KMT with accusations of “illegally occupying” the property and promised voters that if elected, he would use the authority of the government to tear it down and force the KMT off the property.
The KMT lost in the court’s first ruling in May 2021, with the Taipei High Administrative Court deeming the property an “ill-gotten party asset” and that the party obtained ownership through illegal means.
In a separate ruling yesterday, the Taipei High Administrative Court ruled in favor of Broadcasting Corp of China (BCC), saying that the committee’s declaration of the company as a KMT affiliate was incorrect.
The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the BCC after the committee in 2019 deemed it an affiliate of the KMT and ordered it to relinquish 109,627m2 of land to the state and pay NT$7.731 billion.
Yesterday’s ruling can still be appealed.
The committee said it would appeal both rulings.
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