AFP reports:Taiwan's main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party said Wednesday it would appeal a ruling ordering it to return land reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the government.The Taiwan High Court on Tuesday reversed a previous verdict and ruled that the KMT should return eight plots in Taipei county as the party had violated national property law.
"We are surprised by the High Court's decision and basically we would appeal the ruling," said KMT spokesman Huang Yu-chen.
Local media said the 5,000-ping (4.1-acre) land has a market value between 3.5 to 4 billion Taiwan dollars (109-125 million US).
The KMT's assets have been a major target of attacks by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in the run up to the January parliamentary elections and the March presidential polls.
Once one of the world's wealthiest political parties, the KMT said in a first ever report on party assets in 2006 that its wealth had shrunk to around 27.7 billion dollars after huge investment losses in the 1990s.
The KMT traces much of its wealth to its origins in pre-communist China, but it has been accused of illegally amassing a fortune through cozy business links while in power.
How this will affect the election is difficult to say, since voters do not appear to care whether their man is corrupt. It does give a little weight to the DPP's accusations, but the asset referendum was the last election, not the current one. The last paragraph is quite intriguing...it isn't 'cozy business links' that are allegedly the source of the KMT's wealth, but outright looting of government coffers -- as with the land that was the cause of this case....
[Taiwan] [media] [KMT]
Personally, I didn't read "The KMT traces..." to be a statement of fact, but rather that the KMT claims that its wealth is derived from pre-Communist China. A statement of fact would have read: The KMT's wealth can be traced to.... At least, that is my opinion.
ReplyDeleteOK, I changed it.
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