Seoul Central District Court has rejected a prosecution request for arrest warrants against three executives of Lone Star Funds.
If you have anything to say about the Lone Star fiasco—and I don’t—have your say in the comments.
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11 Comments
Hey, third time’s a charm, right? Just keep trying and you’ll eventually get your way, prosecutors.
Seriously, this is a good portent for the rule of law in this country. Still, the question is: When will the prosecutors stop their pandering to mob rule in this country?
Not that we don’t also have a problem with prosecutors pandering to mob rule in the U.S. (witness Elliot Spitzer, Duke Lacrosse team, etc.).
The goal for “rule of law” is for the prosecution — more likely, the Roh clique members who ordered the hit on Lone Star — to accept that “We know you did it” does not necessarily equal “We can prove you did it”. An advanced society must demand that its government be able to prove the guilt of the accused in all cases. Even if we (they) know in our (their) souls that Lone Star probably committed a crime, it’s important to hold the prosecution to the requirement that it prove Lone Star’s guilt.
What’s interesting is that where the aggrieved party — rather than the target — is a foreign-invested company (usually one hit by unfair competition, intellectual-property theft, or embezzlement), the prosecution is ordinarily quite conservative in evaluating the sufficiency of proof.
Well, the prosecution has an “honorable gadget” (sounds like something out of a Charlie Chan movie) that supposedly recorded the Lone Star execs scheming:
http://english.chosun.com/w21d.....60025.html
I have no further comments your honor(able gadget).
I don’t know anything concrete about the honorable gadget or the content of the alleged recording (haven’t heard it yet) but I’ve experienced enough people misunderstanding spoken English in face-to-face conversations here that I’m dubious an accurate transcript of the alleged recording exists. Or that whatever words are actually uttered have been correctly interpreted. Even native English speakers sometimes cannot discern what is said on a muffled recording. And sometimes you hear what you want to hear.
Now, ’scuse me while I kiss this guy.
This isn’t Monty Burns scheming at the Republican National Committee meeting.
From what I hear, the recording from the “honorable gadget” is shite. You’d need to run it past a CSI (i.e. a FICTIONAL lab) to get any coherent sentences out of it in the first place. Also, at the time it was pretty clear to anyone remotely sentient who gave a toss that KEB’s card unit was in deep kimchi regardless of what any press release said or didn’t say, or what was discussed at any board meeting.
True ’nuff. I don’t have an opinion about this one way or the other, just saw that in the Chosun.
Spitzer just got elected gov in New York.
BTW, the “honorable gadget” was submitted to the FSS about a year ago by the DEFENSE, and here the prosecution is holding it up like it’s a smoking gun. Riiiiight.
Spitzer governor? Time to move your corporate HQ out of New York.
If the defense submitted the honorable gadget to FSS a year ago, the fact that a transcript has not turned up in the press can only be interpreted to mean that the transcript is not as much of a smoking gun (if at all) as it’s being portrayed. If it were me, I’d prepare my own transcript and pre-emptively release that to the Korean and international press — then watch how it’s portrayed in each.
Off topic, but I had a question for anyone familiar with intellectual property law here in Korea. There’s a new show on MBC which contains uncanny - as in identical - plot similarities to a late 80’s comedy from the US. I doubt the Korean producers are paying royalties to the American studio that produced the original (how long are film rights actually protected for?) and if my suspicions are correct how would I go about bringing this to the attention of the parties involved?