The Taipei High Administrative Court on Monday ruled that the National Women’s League was an affiliate of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) before 2004, and ordered it to pay NT$17.89 billion (US$551.82 million) to the state.
The women’s group in February 2018 sued the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee for classifying it as a KMT affiliate, claiming that it had not been controlled or run by the party, the court said in a statement.
The committee also froze the assets of the women’s group, including NT$38.5 billion in cash. The group was founded in 1950 by Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) wife Soong Mayling (宋美齡).
Photo: CNA
It took six years and eight months for the court to rule on the case because the trial was suspended over questions surrounding the Act Governing the Settlement of Ill-gotten Properties by Political Parties and Their Affiliate Organizations (政黨及其附隨組織不當取得財產處理條例) passed in 2016, the statement said.
The court sought a Constitutional Court review of the statute before resuming the trial in 2020 after justices ruled that the act passed by the legislature, then controlled by the Democratic Progressive Party, was constitutional.
The trial was also stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic, the court said.
Both parties agreed that the women’s group was not affiliated with the KMT at the time of the trial.
However, the committee said that the group had previously been under the KMT’s control and should have paid what it determined as “ill-gotten assets” to the state to demonstrate the end of its affiliation.
The court ruled that the women’s group was affiliated with the KMT from 1959 to 2004, and that it received “ill-gotten assets” in the form of donations from 1963 to 2004.
Once the group pays the donations with interest to the state, the end of its affiliation with the KMT would be officially established, the statement said.
The case can be appealed and both the women’s group and the committee have said they plan to do so.
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