MUCH ADO ABOUT MUZHA:The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee has scheduled a hearing for June 6 into whether the KMT paid too little for a plot of land

Taipei Times
Date: May 25, 2017.
By: Chen Wei-han / Staff reporter

A hearing is to be held next month on the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) controversial acquisition of a plot land in Taipei’s Muzha (木柵) area, whose former owner claimed the KMT forcibly bought the property at an unreasonably low price, although a court decades later ruled that there had been nothing illegal about the transaction.

The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee in March announced that it would investigate the KMT’s acquisition of the plot that is now part of the 8,300 ping (2.74 hectare) site housing the party’s National Development and Research Institute to determine if the deal involved any impropriety
It has scheduled a hearing for June 6.

“The hearing would not be an investigation into whether the acquisition had been forced, as that had already been decided by a court, but into whether the KMT had acquired the land at a disproportionately low price,” committee spokeswoman Shih Chin-fang (施錦芳) said.

The disputed 1,820 ping plot was bought by the KMT in 1964 from Yeh Chung-chuan (葉中川), whose family sued the party over the acquisition in 2007.

Yeh’s family had acquired the land in 1939, but the Imperial Japanese Army then occupied it and built a prisoner-of-war camp.

The land was later taken over by the KMT after it retreated to Taiwan after losing the Chinese Civil War.    [FULL  STORY]