Ma:The System Defends Itself

The Taiwan News has the key points of the ruling in the Ma case:

1. The judges decided not to allow as evidence the testimony of witness Wu Li-ru, a Taipei City government treasurer, as they sided with Ma's lawyers' argument that Prosecutor Hou Kuan-jen asked Wu hypothetical questions. The judges added that Wu only said "yes" or "mmm" in response to the prosecutor's questions during the indictment, which the panel argued could not be taken as answers to Hou's questions, therefore invalidating the testimony as legal evidence.

2. The panel endorsed the view of witness Chang Che-chen, former auditing official of the KMT government and currently KMT deputy secretary general, which is that the funds in question are perks for government officials for public use. The judges argued that since the government has, for the past 40 years, failed to institutionalize a rule about how officials should use the funds, it is legitimate to regard the funds as perks for governmental ranking public functionaries in addition to their monthly salaries.

3. The judges believed that Ma did not intend to cheat his subordinates and the city government's treasurers when he collected the funds, citing treasurer Wu Li-ru's court testimony that "we followed tradition in (the) practice (of reimbursement)."

4. Ma's yearly Control Yuan report, in which he stated that the remaining funds were taken as personal income, was deemed not to have been premeditated. Ma reported it as such because the money was already in his account, which contained a mix of his salary and other personal income, the judges held.

5. According to the indictment, Ma collected NT$4,129,073 from the special funds between December 1998 and July 2006, but the judges upheld Ma's innocence as they said that during his two-terms as Taipei mayor between 1999 and 2006 he had also donated NT$63,078,949 to charity, which is over five times the amount of money from the special fund.

Point number 6 is absolutely comical -- theft isn't made right if you donate the funds to charity! The judges' bizarre logic is that if I steal a government computer worth a grand, and then donate the computer plus $5,000 to charity, it's not theft. Really, you can see, reading these points, that the conclusion was a foregone one. The judges didn't want to convict.

What happened? Well, I think this verdict boils down to two questions:

Was what Ma did illegal?
You betcha. I don't think there's any question about it. On the face of the law, keeping that money in his personal account was illegal. Ma himself conceded that. His defense was that the KMT intended that everyone should keep it despite it being illegal on its face.

Does everyone do it?
You betcha. And I think, even more fundamental than the Blue-Green divide, this verdict was a case of the System protecting itself. One of the ways the KMT bought the loyalty of the bureaucracy was to place the special funds in their personal account and then look the other way while the bureaucracy treated half of it as an income subsidy. That claim of Ma's is entirely correct: the money is meant to be stolen. That is what the KMT planned. There are 6,000+ positions on the island that receive these special funds, posts held over the years by many people. Hence, if Ma were convicted, thousands upon thousands of officials faced investigations and convictions. I suspect the System took one look at that future of constant investigation and political chaos, and blinked.

Sure, it had something to do with the fact that the System is largely pro-Blue, as are the judges and prosecutors, and that the prosecutor in the case was a friend of Ma's (something the foreign media have failed repeatedly to report). But that's not the entire consideration here.

Note also that the judges have now set a precedent that applies to the Chen Shui-bian case. In the Ma case the judges focused on Ma's intent. Did Chen intend to steal the cash? Well, as the prosecutor in that case averred a while back, the money isn't in any of the personal accounts. The indictment is essentially for falsifying receipts. Another precedent too -- in both the Ma case and the case of Tainan mayor Hsu, the Court accepted the argument that the defendant had given more money to charity than was allegedly nicked. Chen has made a analogical argument pointing out that the money he stole was less than the amount of salary he has given up as President (my review of the Chen case here).

And so Ma Ying-jeou passes Go and gets to collect his $330,000. The real tragedy here is that this special funds subsidy is going to continue to corrupt another generation of politicians into viewing the government as their own personal ATM. What we need is an amnesty for all the officials who took it and an end to the Special Funds regime.

UPDATE: Ma is asking that all investigations be dropped:

Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday urged prosecutors to stop wasting energy and judicial resources on probing other public officials' use of their special allowance funds, saying that the verdict in his trial should put an end to the controversy over the funds.

Describing the verdict as the "voice of justice," Ma said an hour after learning the ruling that he had always believed he would be found innocent, adding that the ruling should resolve all disputes over the use of the special allowance fund by defining it as a subsidy.

"This waste of time and resources should be put to an end now ... The prosecutors should make a wise decision on whether they're going to look into other officials' allowance funds," Ma told a press conference yesterday at the office of Lee and Li Attorneys-at-Law.

When asked whether he meant the prosecutors should not investigate the use of such funds by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) bigwigs such as Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), former premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) and presidential candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), Ma said the prosecutors should stop wasting time on any special allowance cases.

"This applies to everyone, whether he or she is a politician or a government official," he said.

The System protects its own. UPDATE II: Of course, Ma has to take that position. Should anyone else be convicted of something similar, it will make the verdict in his case look like he got a pass because he is Ma Ying-jeou.

[Taiwan] [KMT] [Ma Ying-jeou]