A MBC News program called News Who has interviewed former Samsung lawyer Kim Young Chul, the person who revealed that Samsung created several bank accounts in his name and used it to manage slush funds. Showing a document allegedly written by Chairman Lee Kun-hee’s secretaries, which summarized his directives, he made the following revelations;
- According to Kim, Samsung Vice Chairman Lee Hak-soo and President Kim In-joo personally went looking for him. Later, he showed text messages from them saying that they wanted to meet with him. He also claimed that the 2002 Presidential election slush fund and Everland CB cases were “fixed”.
- He claims he got calls from several of his co-workers advising him to make a deal with Samsung and that if he wasn’t careful “he might end his days in a cold, dark alley”
- His main responsibility was to “manage” prosecutors and judges. According to News Who, the so called list of prosecutors contains 40 names. Prosecutors received 5,000 to 20,000 USD, during a single payment session depending on rank and position. According to him, some prosecutors even came to him and asked him why they were not on the unofficial payroll.
- Kim allegedly received directives from Chairman Lee on “managing” prosecutors and judges. Although the directive came from the above mentioned document, in some cases he claimed that he received direct oral orders from Lee. In one case, when Lee’s in-laws were facing investigation from Incheon and Suwon prosecutors, Lee was said to have ordered him to “better manage the prosecutors from the provinces.”
- As for personalities who would not accept cash, Lee is said to have suggested two alternatives, hotel discount coupons and wines.
All I can say is that hearing all this from a former insider is mind numbing to say the least. What is also mind numbing is that this doesn’t look like a simple bribe for favors case. Instead, it looks like a systematic effort by one corporation to control the government, the judicial branch, and the media, pretty much the entire nation. “Samsung Republic”, indeed.
49 Comments
The real question is how will Koreans want to deal with this. Will they roll over and go to sleep or will they demand accountability, especially since, if they don’t, then they deserve to be treated like slaves.
not mind-numbing at all.
everyone knows they have slush funds. this merely outlines how money is doled out. but, really, we could have imagined this, couldn’t we?
key point: samsung and other chaebol have slush funds. they use them to curry favor. they do this today, just as they have for decades.
AND….R.Elgin’s point is a bit off, from my perspective. Slush funds in Korea are a fact of life. And most Koreans I know are pissed off with that kind of thing but they don’t feel that it’s worth getting in a tizzy over them because they don’t feel there is much they can do. Should they be treated like slaves because they don’t rise up against the might corporate chieftains and the dirty politicians they feed?
Please. Get a grip. Society is a complex thing. Koreans have been on a mission for years to clean up their society and it’s working. That mission has come from the grassroots and political leaders. Election bribery is down and the country has gotten good grades internationally for its efforts.
“The real question is how will Koreans want to deal with this. Will they roll over and go to sleep or will they demand accountability, especially since, if they don’t, then they deserve to be treated like slaves.”
Roll over, go to sleep, AND continue to take it in the bum.
Seriously, I can understand it though. Samsung is responsible for such a big chunk of the economy nobody really wants to see them get taken down too hard. A lot of people are, without a doubt, unwilling to see what a real shake up in the world of Samsung would mean for their individual situation.
Also, and Koreans know this more intimately than most of us ever will, I think the average Korean doesn’t see much point in getting worked up over a system he/she reckons is so hopelessly rigged, it isn’t worth trying to fix.
Seeing the chairmen of SK, Hanwha, Hyundai Motor, and other pillars of Korean business getting nailed over the years for various felonies, serving minimal if any jail time, and keeping their titles and money must have the effect - along with seemingly unlimited political corruption - of making people highly cynical about the way their world runs.
What troubles me, however, is that when I ask Korean coworkers or students about this kind of corruption, some express envy in addition to disgust and anger. Like some of them wish it were them giving the shaft to everybody else instead of being on the receiving end. This certainly cannot be unique to Korea, but it is a little disheartening to see.
You guys mistakenly have focused on Samsung. I did not say Samsung should be severly punished. There are good economic reasons not to beat up on Samsung too much, least of which is my brand-new 23-inch Samsung LCD monitor I’m looking at right now or the stock that I own.
Rather, the problem is the prosecutors, judges and others that should have been above taking the money but took it anyway. There is the clear implication that there were clean prosecutors and judges that did not take a bribe and had to be pressured. Perhaps you guys and everyone else should “get a grip” and consider the people who take an oath to do justice yet sell it out — a clear lack of character and a betrayal of the country they were supposed to serve.
Perhaps it is nature of business to occasionally push at the fabric of society in pursuing its goals but it is the duty of prosecutors and judges to push back and define that society by direct intervention, when needed. Anything less is not satisfactory.
R. Elgin wrote:
“Perhaps you guys and everyone else should “get a grip””
I’m not sure who needs to get a grip, but it may be your comment that Koreans would “deserve to be treated like slaves” that led other posters to try to put this in perspective.
why is this waegookin who owns Sam Sung stock telling Koreans they deserve to be treated like slaves?
he’s profiting off the same company he condemns. Nice.
in East Asia, people don’t like to do anything that would seriously harm the well being of the group.
Japan always votes LDP no matter how much wrong their previous PM had done.
Wasn’t the latest LDP PM to step down simply replaced by another LDP PM, and there was only a handful of cases of actual party changes in power?
I guess the Japanese also deserve to be treated like slaves.
we do fine without your input and condescending attitude.
it’s not very much different from how your daddy’s used to say, whites can control their vices, but black can’t, etc.
“Instead, it looks like a systematic effort by one corporation to control the government, the judicial branch, and the media, pretty much the entire nation. ”
Why are you surprised? Don’t you remember the accusations against Kim Dae Jung’s son? The Hyundai guy who is believed to have jumped out his window? The stories of Roh Moo Hyun’s brother being chauffeured around? The apartments in Kangnam that were found packed up to their ceilings with boxes of cash?
#6.
I didn’t say I was surprised by all this.
Really?? You must live in a Korea that exists in an another dimension.
“mind numbing”? no, that’s just SOP.
Just because the statement “Korea sucks” is true, that does not mean that Korea sucks much less than it ever has in its history, and will — with luck — suck even less in the future. I’ve been here over 10 years and will most likely be here another 10 at least, so count me in with the “suck less” optimists.
I give this country and society much credit for every corruption scandal. Without outrage and a will to change, these discoveries aren’t scandals at all. Plus, ever notice that the amounts in question seem to keep getting smaller? That’s progress — people are afraid to make the big score. While I’m certain that some shocking corruption will be discovered in respect of the Roh Moo Hyun gang, we need to compare to the billion-dollar capers of the past.
And the good news is, it will be discovered and exposed to sunlight. People are no longer so good at keeping these secrets secret.
So I say Korea is getting better. The bad news is, it really seems like Korea is getting better at a slower pace than its competitors.
I agree with all that — these things ARE getting better here. Ya shouldda been here when - - - when this case never wouldda become public at all, that lawyer’d just be dead, ruled a suicide. This case is one more step in the long slow better-getting.
> Korea is getting better at a slower pace than its competitors.
I think that depends whom you see as its “competitors”…
some perspective for you, mins:
http://www.citizenworks.org/enron/corp-scandal.php
Brendan, I think i’ve mentioned it here before but, just for shits and giggles:
Check out Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index for Korea. When the head was in town a few years ago, he was asked by reporters why Korea’s score keeps getting worse when TI is saying that Korea’s corruption situation is getting better. The answer? All of the scandals that heretofore were not coming to light are not coming to light. This makes things temporarily worse on the CPI (which of course is a PR tool for TI, but that’s another story). Some journalists didn’t like that answer because it means a temporary bad rep for Korea. But, it supports the point you made above. And I think it’s spot on.
Things are getting better..hmm…we I’ve to admit, that this is a more open society compared to the Park and Chun eras.
But it seems like people especially mjw are misunderstanding me. As Brendon says it is getting better in terms of events like these making the light of day, but other than there isn’t much improvement in rooting out and preventing corruption in government bodies. There also isn’t much progress in terms of maintaining the rule of law. I mean it’s pretty much the same as before and from the looks of it, change isn’t coming soon or it may not come at all.
Let’s look at the bright side, in 20 years of so, Korea might become a society where things like this are rare but seriously does Korea have 20 years?
And mjw, I’m not comparing this with corporate scandals in the US, if that’s what you are implying.
Korea definitely has 20 years. After all, there’s 5000 years of history here. With will to change, Korea can make the same kind of dynamic bounce as Ireland, Spain, Portugal, or — dare I say it? — Britain.
This doesn’t mean I am saying “Lay off of the crooks, it’s getting better.” More effort still is what I would prescribe. But let’s not poor-mouth all the efforts thus far.
That’s the problem, the will to change isn’t there and if it is there it gets drowned out in all the background noise.
BTW, mjw didn’t you say this in one of my previous posts?
It’s ironic that at an another post you say that things are “biz as usual” while at this post you state that things are “getting better”
So which is it?
my opinion is that, Lee Hwae Chang being able to come in #2 in polling with most of his support from TK and Park’s ass lovers is proof that there is still something fundamentally wrong with the psyche in Korea.
i personally know of one Los Angeles Korean family that was in the right jool suh gi on Lee Hwae Chang’s camp, and failed to convert when he lost.
i bet you there’s already a line of corps w/ slush, hedging their bets on whether or not Lee Hwae Chang will get his 25 to 30% to win the election.
may Lee Myung Bak win
BIZ AS USUAL. haha! you got me!! touche!
and about the corporate scandals in the US: indeed, i know you were NOT comparing. hence my call for some perspective.
one point where I AGREE WITH YOU ENTIRELY (100%, ABSOLUTELY, ETC..), mins, is about the “rule of law” issue. i’ve harped on this for years (usually to my wife…). i really and truly believe that Korea has to fix up its police force and start to enforce basic laws. i don’t pay to the alter of Guliani’s “fix every broken window, paint over all graphiti” theory but there really is at least something to it. What if people couldn’t break simple laws with impunity anymore?
They would be much, much angrier about the injustice of lax enforcement against big-time crooks, that’s for sure.
It can actually be both, if your mind’s not rigidly fixed on the subject yet. There’s good grounds for both cynicism and optimism here…
> That’s the problem, the will to change isn’t there
I would say that it is, among many influential individuals yet unable to do too much about it. Many recognize the necessity of improving transparency etc standards. Institutions, laws and social habits take longer to change, as with anywhere.
I was responding to #17, four slipped in while i was typing!
#22.
Yes there are grounds for both optimism and cynicism. But since mjw makes a point of needling me, I took the opportunity for needling him back. Not that I’m thin skinned or have a lot of time on hands, but when the opportunity presents itself…
OK, there are some people who over lunch or dinner or drinks will tell you how Korea needs to be more transparent, reformed, etc…. Fine words, yes and since they may be not in a position to do anything, all they can do is talk. But let’s just say they get into that position. Then would they translate words into action? Well only time will tell, and hopefully they will turn those words into action. But so far, the track record of those “influential people” isn’t good. For example, there is this one ROK president, who went around promising to “reform” this country. Look what happened to him when he came into the position of actually doing something.
There’s a serious absence of perspective among the pollyannas here, including the legal beagle posing as a cynic. The founders of the Joseon Dynasty had a will to change things, and they did in many ways, including imposing a form of Confucianism onto Korean society as a legislatively-enacted and police enforced normative vision of social order. From the perspective of traditional Confucianism, however, this was at the outset a questionable and increasingly became a iperversion of Confucian ideals. Most significantly, it was one that after the chaos of the late Goryeo and the marginal fluidity of early Joseon served to rigidify Korean society in a fashion that even more effectively served the interests of the class of Seoul-centered aristocratic/bureaucratic that was centered on a increasingly smaller number of privileged families who had been dominating Korea since early Goryeo and would continue to do so at least through the end of the dynasty and arguably until the Korean War (and whose ancestors effectively controlled Unified Silla). Those clans now have either disappeared or generally been displaced from the commanding heights. But the dynamic of self-serving elite dominance of Korea continues in the post-war kleptocracry that Korea at large still does not have the will to “retire”, as evidenced by the half-hearted reforms of KDJ and the wholesale backpeddling of The Great Pretender and his Know-Nothings at the slightest hint of further serious inroads on the predominant nationalist/mercantilist project, either from the despised foreigners or threatened by the jaebol themselves in the form of “warnings” about reduced domestic capital investment or increased overseas investment (and job exports) who play the national wealth card so effectively to dupe Korea at large in continuing policies that ensure theur continued dominance of the economy at the expense of most Koreans.
“For example, there is this one ROK president, who went around promising to “reform” this country.”
Only one? Promises of ‘reform’ have been on the lips of every democratically elected president in recent history.
That last sentence of Sperwer’s is a humdinger, and I can’t say I disagree with him. The Korean elite is egregiously self-serving, especially in the past and disappointingly so during Korea’s (brief) democratic history.
But I don’t share Sperwer’s level of cynicism yet — perhaps because I haven’t been through the same shocking betrayals (in the plural, I regret to say) that he’s experienced, but perhaps simply because our personalities are different. Or maybe I’ve just been lucky. Or both.
From this beagle’s perspective, though, it reads like Sperwer’s saying “Korea still sucks” and in that respect I can’t argue with the man. Where we differ is my view that the suckitude is, however, getting less sucky every day. Maybe not less sucky as fast as we’d want, as consistently progressively as we’d want, or wish the hoi polloi would demand — but less sucky nonetheless.
As for me, with the democratic experience in Korea being all of 15 years long — during most of which time the democracy was led by rather undemocratic “democrats”, enjoying their turn behind the levers of a fascist bureaucracy — I am willing to be a little more patient before declaring “Korea will fail.” Your mileage may vary.
#26.
“Reforms” have been actively promised by only one such ROK president, who BTW made it the main theme of his presidency The others promised a lot of things but they didn’t promise to change the country via “reforms” as this one president has.
> serious absence of perspective among the pollyannas here
There are no “pollyannas” here at all, that i can read. A pollyanna would say “There’s no corruption in South Korea, or at least not much, it’s very good” — and nobody has come close to saying that.
To say “There’s plenty of corruption in South Korea, way too much, but that situation has been getting better for 15 years, and gives every indication that it will continue to improve, albeit slowly” — is very far from “pollyanna” talk.
And yes, others of us do have some historical perspective on this — enough to know that the real trends visible now are different than ever happened before in Korea’s 2000 years.
Social / institutional change of this magnitude often takes a century, bro. I remember how it’s gone with racism in the USA for the entire 50 years of my life…
Have some patience, and give contemporary Koreans just a bit of credit.
needling?
All I can say is that hearing that from an official Marmot’s Hole insider is mind numbing to say the least.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m surprised!
Seriously, though, Mins. Why don’t you stop, go back, and read my very first response to your post. You could totally disagree with what I wrote but I don’t think it’s fair to say I was “needling” you. That’s bullshit. You could call me an idiot, tell me reasonably why you think that way, and I would appreciate that more than saying I’m needling you and use that for an excuse to …needle back?
mjw, I always try to keep an open mind.
As you can see I can take criticism and if I feel that the other person has misunderstood me then I will explain my point to that person. As for you, well some of your comments are harmless, bur some of your comments on the other hand are not simple criticism but simple put downs. So, if the opportunity presents itself, yes I’ll needle you.
Now that I think about it, maybe I should take Linkd’s advice and ignore your uhm… comments.
Joined this at the end of the day to find my name on the last post - an honor. Now, let’s see…I think my advice back then was just to stop chasing each other’s tails.
Now that it looks like this Samsung thread has about run its course, let me add my own PS that, in my time, I have met lots of honest businessmen, and the the sleaze I have come across here has more often been public sector, including its tentacles in the media and other quasi-private institutions.
By which I mean to say, that for any given slush fund, there just might be as much pull as push to get it into the targeted pockets.
I did give them such “credit” as the facts warrant: see comments re DJ and the current President manque.
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
…that if he wasn’t careful “he might end his days in a cold, dark alley”
Very dramatic.
If this was the premise for a John Grisham novel, the whistle-blower Kim Young Chul, would become a public interest lawyer, suing the pants off the rich, powerful and the overly-privileged.
And the foreign legal beagle, one B Carr, would realize that his strained optimism about the Korean business environment is entirely self-serving. He would then discover his true purpose in life…representing desperate English teachers facing charges of possessing weed.
Don’t forget for free.
So, when did you change your policy of not having to do anything with weed carrying English teachers?
Not that I have any intention of touching off a Korean vs expat battle, but as a side note, a lot of Koreans made similar comments to the one made by Netizen Kim, when I mentioned the expat reaction to my post.
Well, every continent has 5,000+ years of history. Brendon, you’re starting to spout local platitudes, and that worries me. Sperwer’s right; you’re just a poser.
Joongang Ilbo finally made mention of this issue today and I do not think this issue is going away just yet . . . it may be thrust aside in the media, for now, thanks to Hanara problems.
In this poser’s defense, that 5000 years of history aside was in jest. I am fully aware that the “5000 years of history” meme is utter bunk. But in the interest of a modicum of fairness, I have to reserve the possibility that just because Koreans are full of shit on 5000 years of history, four seasons, fan death and all concepts of market economics does not necessarily mean they’re full of shit on everything.
Not to mention Honest Abe’s log house, George Washington’s cherry tree and John F. Kennedy’s limbido. Uh, nevermind on JFK’s limbido. That one may be real.
Right. And another meme spouted off for measure is that English teachers in Korea are hopheads. In fact, some are skirt-chasers and others are child-diddlers, so let’s not stereotype.
Mr. Carr is right. Korea has been gradually changing. Under Park, there was nothing wrong with JaeBols visiting the Blue House to deposit money.
Jun Doo Hwan expected it, too. I’m not sure, but one of the big jae bols learned a big lesson when he tried to tell Jun that this was hurting his company.
Comes Roh Tae Woo. Strangely, a lot of things seem illegal and immoral. Too bad. Roh was convicted of the same he was criticizing.
Comes Kim Yong Sam. Kim seemed like the great reformer. There was once a massive witch hunt for dirty people with something to hide. Pity. His son was convicted of worse and the same.
Comes Kim Dae Jung. Korea becomes more liberal. His 3 sons are former convicts.
Comes Noh Moo Hyun. He’s responsible for anti-Japanese collaborator whip. Let’s see how history judges him.
You all have it wrong. Reform didn’t start with Kim Dae Jung and Noh Moo Hyun. It started with Kim Yong Sam.
Reform did take place under Kim Dae Jung and Noh Moo Hyun, believe it or not, like it or not. Women groups never had such a position. Hojuk disappearing? Unthinkable at one time. Political bribes still happen, yes. Those who get singled out on tv are those who are targeted by the blue house. That was the case.
Now, anyone makes the news for it.
gets a slap on the wrist or more, even if that hurts the economy. Hyundai comes to mind.
Sprewar, do you spew off before or after making love to your wife?
Sonagi, get a man.
I believe WangKon936 may have meant JFK’s interest in ‘the forbidden dance’, the lambada.
uh yes gbnhi… If children are reading, I meant the lambada…. :p
apologies to the personal attacks.
Reading comment #40 puts me at ease, Brendon.
I’d love to fornicate with you, wjk, but I don’t care to join the ranks of Kelsey Peterson, Debra LaFave, and Mary Kay Letourneau.
#47.
I believe there are ways of criticizing wjk without bringing up images of forbidden sex. Not that I don’t enjoy your comments.