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TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – Finance Minister Christina Liu’s resignation has been accepted, the government announced Wednesday evening.

A successor has not been appointed yet, but her deputy, Tseng Ming-chung, will take over her responsibilities for the time being, a government spokesman said.

Liu took leave of absence Wednesday after insisting the government should be looking for a successor. She tendered her resignation Tuesday as she said a version of the capital gains tax proposed by ruling Kuomintang lawmakers was too different from her government-sponsored proposal. President Ma Ying-jeou, Premier Sean Chen and top financial officials held an emergency meeting Tuesday night but failed to talk Liu out of resigning, reports said.

She told Chen to find a successor, while the premier told her to stay on and try to find a compromise version between her own capital gains tax proposal and the version worked out by KMT legislators, which itself was a merger of about five different versions. Chen did not approve Liu’s resignation, a government spokesman said late Tuesday.

The KMT lawmakers’ version of a capital gains tax included a dual-track mechanism which allowed individual investors to choose one of two options. They could either include stock gains in their annual income or have the gains taxed by between 0.02 percent and 0.06 percent, but only if the stock index exceeded 8,500 points. The index rose to 7,342.29 Tuesday but closed 80 points lower Wednesday.

Liu asked for the day off, reports said Wednesday, but aides were reportedly packing up some of her belongings.

KMT lawmaker Lai Shyh-bao, the author of one of the tax proposals and of the KMT version, said Liu should have voiced her opinions at the Monday meeting working out a compromise.

The ruling party caucus said Wednesday it would continue to work on the issue and called on Chen to bring Liu along for more meetings. Lawmaker Wu Yu-sheng said that the present situation was unacceptable. Liu either resigned or did not resign, he said. Wu told reporters that she had complained about Ma not coming out to mediate in the tax dispute.

The Legislative Yuan’s Finance Committee was scheduled to start reviewing the capital gains tax on June 4, but it was not immediately known how Liu’s absence might affect the proceedings.

Democratic Progressive Party caucus whip Pan Men-an said chaos was absolute because nobody knew who would show up at the meeting to represent the government and which versions of the tax would be on the table. The new KMT lawmakers’ version had not officially been listed on the legislative agenda, he said.

Critics condemned the KMT proposal for favoring business groups and pronounced tax reform dead for the next four years, Ma’s second term. Major investors and big business groups would have to pay no tax at all under the new version, tax reform activists said, echoing complaints made by Liu.

The proposal by the ruling party lawmakers was a complete betrayal of Ma’s publicly announced plans because it would not make the wealthy pay more, the Alliance for Fair Tax Reform said. Liu’s resignation was the latest example of the president abandoning his policies in the face of opposition from within the ranks of his own followers, the reformers said.