The semi-defunct Control Yuan recently reported on recorded political donations for last December’s local elections. An impressive amount of money was raised and spent by the politicians – and inevitably a large number of donations (around 400) were of dubious legality. However:
Control Yuan Secretary-General Tu Shan-liang (杜善良) said that initial screening of accounting reports showed that there are a great number of suspected law violations, which can be determined only by the fourth Control Yuan, whose members have still not been confirmed and hence are unable to take over from the third Control Yuan members to start their six-year term in office.
Got that? Political donations are now (and have been for over a year) completely un-policed. Not only that: until the Legislature appoints new members to the Control Yuan, anyone who makes an illegal political donation is protected by the constitution from prosecution.
Of course, when (or is that if?) the Control Yuan is appointed they can plow through their massive backlog of cases (I believe it’s well over 10,000 now) and prosecute offenders – with one big caveat: there is a timelimit of 3 years between the incident and the investigation. If we assume that the current political impasse will last through CSB’s term as president (as seems possible), then any crimes committed in the first few months of 2005 can not be investigated.
Luckily political corruption isn’t a problem in Taiwan, so there’s nothing to worry about …
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*dissolves into peals of mad, mad laughter*
Michael
Tom DeLay, you’ll always have a home in Taiwan.
Another thanks to our “do-nothing” pan-blue dominated legislature that claims to be against corruption.
The result of the do-nothing legislature and the lack of any legislative agenda is nothing short of cancerous. It’s had a poisonous effect on the Chen administration in making them stretch and even break the law to get any policy implemented, and I think this contributed indirectly to corruption as well–government officials are picked for their loyalties, and once you get the idea that you’re supposed to work creatively around laws, you won’t feel so bad about shifting around a few bids here and there in return for some favors from friends.
Man, this is what annoys me about Ma. He thinks he’s superman. He thinks he’s Mr. Clean. So what? One person, one party, no matter how great, won’t be able to solve problems unless the system is set up well. The constitutional reforms are necessary. Taiwan can’t go on having a legislature whose function appears to be only to make tv spots and embarass officials, and where policies are never codified into law but are implemented based on the individual whims of the officials. Argh… even a marginally useful control yuan is better than not having one at all…