Former President Park Now Being Accused of Accepting Bribes from the National Intelligence Service
This is a bombshell of an accusation if true:
Prosecutors said Wednesday they will indict ousted President Park Geun-hye on additional bribery charges as early as this week over allegations that during her term Park took bribes from the state spy agency.
An official from the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office said that prosecutors are also considering “gradually pressing charges against the others involved.”
Prosecutors have been investigating allegations that the National Intelligence Service (NIS), South Korea’s main spy agency, provided Park with up to 200 million won (US$188,000) in kickbacks every month between May 2013 and July 2016.
Prosecutors suspect that the NIS paid Park around 3.8 billion won in total and that she used those funds personally or to carry out illicit political activities. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but if President Park was receiving that much money every month as a bribe from the National Intelligence Service (NIS) then she needs to receive jail time. With that said I would love to see what this evidence is because the evidence of all her other supposed crimes has not been very forthcoming during this whole legal process she is going through.
Given that none of the people giving the bribes have been identified or indicted, this reminds me of a similar story from 2000 or so years ago where only the woman was accused, tried, and convicted (before she had a trial).
Unfortunately, there seems to be no one very interested in actual justice:
John 8:2-9 (ESV)
Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him.
This serves several purposes for Moon. It distracts from the previous charges, which began to look like they were going nowhere. It puts pressure on anyone in NIS who might have been thinking about floating criticism of Moon’s overtures to North Korea. And it looks good to tie up Park in court for more months before this too, probably, disappears as a prosecutable matter, meaning she will not be able to be a focus for discontent with Moon’s administration. I can’t help but think too, that Moon and his friends are not really prosecuting Park herself, but rather all the indignities their people suffered from her father. Of course, if part of the aim is to prevent a focus of discontent from forming, it tells us that the Moonies are still very worried about not just a conservative backlash to their policies, but a wider backlash for which the conservatives would merely be a face. This in turn might indicated that polling has revealed to the Moonies just how weakly their policies are supported. So – look to more anti-US stories in the next little while as part of the program to restart the Sunshine Policy.
More charges for the Commie show trial. What happened to mountains of evidence. Clearly a coup was staged.
It really looks like Moon is a pathetic little man. I would have expected that a man of greater stature would have “pardoned” Park (which serves as a conviction while looking like a statesman).
So very sad for South Korea.
He’s basically conducting a witch hunt of all the former government officials like LMB, Kim Kwan-jin, etc. It’s pretty disgusting.