Category: Politics-Korea

It was only a matter of time, but with the Park Geun-hye trial and sentencing out of the way, the Moon administration can next focus on Lee Myung-bak:

Former President Lee Myung-bak was indicted on bribery, embezzlement and other charges Monday, becoming the latest South Korean leader arrested or entangled in scandals at the close of their terms or after leaving office.

Lee’s indictment came three days after his successor Park Geun-hye was sentenced to 24 years in prison for a separate corruption scandal.

The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office said in a statement that it charged Lee with taking a total of 11 billion won ($10 million) in bribes from the country’s spy agency, Samsung and others.  [Washington Post]

You can read more at the link, but he is likely going to jail as well.  Remember that Korea is not a rule of law society, but instead a rule by law.  This means those in power have enormous influence over legal proceedings.  The Korean left has long wanted to take down Lee Myung-bak because of the corruption investigation he initiated on former left wing President Roh Moo-hyun.  Roh ended up committing suicide after his corruption came to light under the investigation led by the Lee administration.

Former President Park has received more time in prison than murderers and rapists in Korea:

Former President Park Geun-hye was sentenced to 24 years in prison and 18 billion won in fine on Friday in a massive corruption scandal that toppled her from power early last year.

In a live televised trial, the Seoul Central District Court meted out the guilty verdict for the 66-year-old former leader, about a year after her arrest in late March of 2017.

Park was convicted of 16 counts of corruption, including bribery, coercion and abuse of power. Prosecutors had demanded a 30-year jail term.  [Yonhap]

Here is what the judge found her guilty of:

They include forcing conglomerates to contribute 77.4 billion won to two non-profit foundations Choi controlled; forcing Hyundai Motor Group to sign deals with Choi-controlled companies; forcing Lotte Group to pitch into Choi’s project to build a sports facility in return for a duty-free business license; forcing Posco to create a fencing team and have the Choi-controlled The Blue K take over its management; and forcing Samsung Group to fund some 1.6 billion won to a winter sports education center practically run by Choi as well as buy three horses for Choi, whose daughter Chung Yoo-ra is a dressage athlete.

“Park abused the power given to her by the people of the country and conspired with Choi to demand bribes from companies and meddle in their business decisions,” Kim said. “She abused her power as the president and received 14 billion won worth of bribes from Samsung and Lotte, and requested 8.9 billion won from SK Group.”

The court said Park received bribes worth 7.2 billion won from Samsung Group, though it cannot determine how much she kept for herself.

Park was also found guilty of abusing her power by blacklisting artists and cultural figures critical of her administration and exercising undue influence in the appointment of civil servants. She was found guilty of abusing her power as president to pressure former senior official of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Roh Tae-kang, to step down, after he pointed out problems concerning special treatment given to Choi’s daughter. The court judged Park had also pressured three officials in the ministry who did not cooperate on blacklisting artists to step down.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

So she was convicted of taking bribes even though the prosecutors could not prove she received any bribes.  I have yet to see definitive evidence of how Park supposedly pressured these companies to donate Choi’s organizations.  Has anyone seen a definitive listing of the evidence that proves she told someone to donate money to Choi or else?

Interestingly this is what she was not convicted of:

However, the judge found Park not guilty of pressuring Samsung Electronics’ Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong to financially help Choi’s equestrian daughter, Chung Yoo-ra.  [Korea Times]

So in the end all the drama of extraditing Chung Yoo-ra back to Korea was all about nothing.

Park’s lawyers will likely appeal the ruling.  I suspect that this sentence will be greatly reduced after the appeals process takes place, which is why I think this heavy sentencing is more for domestic political consumption.  ROK Heads may remember Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong received a five year sentence for corruption and then was quietly released on appeal a few months later.  I don’t think Park will be released in a few months, but I doubt she will do 24 years in prison considering rapists and murderers don’t spend that much time in Korean jails.

I have no idea whether the accusation that the South Korean K-Pop group Red Velvet is pro-Communism or not, but I just find it ironic that these performers are so eager to perform for a man that puts his own people into labor camps for watching South Korean entertainment.  The hypocrisy on display is truly incredible:

After the two-hour show at the East Pyongyang Grand Theater starting at 6:30 p.m., Kim met and shook hands with each musician, including four members of Red Velvet. The popular band from SM Entertainment was short of one member ― Joy, also an actress.

SM announced Saturday that she could not travel to the North because she was filming MBC’s TV drama “The Great Seducer,” in which she has a leading role.

Before its Pyongyang visit, the band had stirred controversy, with suggestions by some netizens that the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism had selected the band because it endorsed the North’s communism. Some suggested a parallel between communism’s symbolic color of red, the band’s name and one of its hits, “Red Flavor.”

Kim said after meeting the musicians, “many people had wondered whether I would come to the Sunday performance and watch Red Velvet.” The comment hinted that he knew about the Red Velvet controversy, but he did not elaborate. He said he had planned to watch the North-South joint performance on Tuesday, but had changed his schedule.

The band, the youngest stars among the troupe, performed dance numbers “Red Flavor” and “Bad Boy.”

Joy’s absence had divided fans. Some saw it as unacceptable because despite her busy acting schedule she had joined the band’s Tokyo concert on March 28-29. Fans wondered that if she had performed in Japan why she could not also have found time for Pyongyang.

A South Korean cultural critic said her absence from the North was “an example of the mass-narcissism evident among South Korean celebrities.”  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

Moon decided to use the word "nodong" instead of "geunro" to refer to labor in his constitutional revision bill. "Geunro" means "diligent or faithful" labor. Working faithfully for whom? https://t.co/53OXKXpf3i

— Ha-young Choi (@Hy_Choi0826) March 25, 2018

The campaign to put former President Lee Myung-Bak in jail next to Park Geun-hye continues:

The prosecution will question former President Lee Myung-bak next Wednesday over a wide range of wrongdoings allegedly sanctioned under his administration. The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office said it asked Lee to appear before the district office at 9:30 a.m. March 14.

The summons came amid intensifying investigation into members of Lee’s family and close aides, and their incriminating statements. Lee is facing abuse of power charges for managing hundreds of billions of won (hundreds of millions of dollars) in a slush fund through DAS, a car parts manufacturer ostensibly owned by his elder brother Lee Sang-eun. A key aide managing his assets said Lee owned land in Dogok, southern Seoul, under a borrowed name and the proceeds from the sale of the land were funneled into DAS, substantiating the prosecution’s supposition that Lee Myung-bak was the company owner.

The controversy concerning DAS nearly cost him his 2007 Presidential election as it was among the few entities that recovered its initial investment in full during his term unlike 5,500 investors who lost 100 billion won in a stock price manipulation scandal in 2001.

Lee is suspected of receiving 1.7 billion won in bribes from the National Intelligence Service through many of his key aides who recently confessed about their roles in delivering the money. Lee is also suspected of having Samsung Group pay about 6 billion won in a retainer to a U.S. firm, Akin Gump, of which Samsung was a major client in return for a presidential pardon for group chairman Lee Kun-hee in 2009.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but as I have long said this is all payback by the South Korean left against Lee Myung-Bak for exposing the corruption of former leftwing President Roh Moo-hyun.  The exposing of the corruption led Roh to commit suicide.

Keep the name Im Jong-seok and his background in mind over the next year as South Korea likely moves forward with appeasement Sunshine 2.0 with the Kim regime:

I knew very little about Im Jong-seok until he became President Moon Jae-in’s chief of staff in May. All I knew was that as president of the National Council of Student Representatives, he served a prison term for orchestrating his fellow student Lim Su-kyung’s unauthorized trip to North Korea in 1989.

The council had been influenced by Kim Il Sung’s Juche idea of self-reliance and supported North Korean ideas like the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Korea, abolishing the National Security Law and achieving unification with North Korea based on a federal system. Therefore, it might be natural that some people consider the president’s chief of staff as a former Juche activist since he had been the head of a pro-North group. I thought so, too. If the public is wrong, it is up to Im, as a public official and politician, to set the record straight.

It was a surprise to me that Im responded fiercely when Juche was debated during the National Assembly’s audit of the Blue House on Nov. 6. Jun Hee-kyung, a lawmaker from the opposition Liberty Korea Party lawmaker, brought up the issue and said she saw the Blue House being dominated by Juche supporters and National Council of Student Representatives alumni.

The opposition party’s attack might have been expected, but Im questioned Jun’s motivations in the inquiry. “I don’t know how you lived during the Fifth and Sixth Republic juntas when soldiers-turned-politicians infringed democracy,” Im fired back.

But that was it. I wonder why Im let go of such a great opportunity. If he had said, “I never supported Juche and believe in liberal democracy; how can you say I support Kim Il Sung’s philosophy?,” all doubts could be cleared. But he did not.

So I traced his past and found many aspects of an emotional North Korea sympathizer.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

The always interesting B.R. Myers has an interesting essay posted about the role the Lee Myung-bak conservative right played in the impeachment of fellow conservative President Park Geun-hye:

Not until Park Geun-hye’s presidency (2013-2017) did the issue make a strong comeback. Conservatives in the National Assembly were then roughly divisible into a faction loyal to Park and one loyal to her predecessor Lee Myung Bak. Naturally his followers had learned to like the presidential system during his occupancy of the Blue House (2008-2013), only to find it inherently despotic again the moment Park took over. What really worried them was the likelihood that she would take revenge for the “nomination massacres” that had occurred during Lee’s rule, when he had excluded many of her followers from candidacies in parliamentary elections.

Sure enough, there ensued the “nomination massacre” of spring 2016, in which even some of the most popular pro-Lee or “non-Park” politicians were bypassed for nominations in favor of the president’s people. From then on calls for a parliamentary system grew in intensity until the Lee-conservative press broke the story of the Choi Soon-sil scandal in the autumn of 2016.

It was just what many pols had been waiting for: a chance to get the public so angry about the status quo that it would finally sign off on a whole new system of government. Conservatives were confident they could remove Park with left-wing help without losing the presidency altogether. They would simply make the returning hero Ban Ki-moon their candidate while pushing hard for constitutional revision, then trounce Moon in the election. What could go wrong?  [B.R. Myers]

Well a lot did go wrong if the Lee Myung-Bak supporters thought they could get Ban Ki-moon elected.  He ended up quickly dropping out of the election because of what he said was all the “Fake News” published about him.  It probably was all fake news, but if he can’t fire back against lies in the media he clearly did not have what it took to be the President of South Korea.  Without a strong candidate the Korean right ended up getting trounced in the election now leaving them in a worse position than if Park remained President.

Speaking of fake news I am still curious to who doctored and planted the tablet PC for the media to find?:

The evidence has turned out to be thinner than was initially believed. The tablet PC on which Choi allegedly edited Park’s Dresden speech had so obviously been tampered with that the court did not consider it in Choi’s trial. It is still unclear how Park’s pressuring of businesses to contribute to this or that national team or foundation differed to a criminal degree from established presidential practices. We have to wait and see, but the recent decision to charge her even with meddling in her own party’s nominations suggests a desperation to find things that will stick. While she may well have deserved impeachment by absolute standards, she was probably less deserving of it than a few of her predecessors.

The planting of the tablet PC is the real scandal which no one in the Korean media seems eager to try and uncover. The finding of the tablet is in my opinion what turned the tide against President Park.

Anyway so what happened after President Moon took power?  Well he staffed the Blue House with the same type of people that President Park had around her with hardly a complaint from the media and candlelight protest crowd:

The once bipartisan pretense that removing Park was a non-ideological response to her abuses of power is now upheld only by the right-wing impeachers and the foreign press. Upon his election Moon appointed several Gangnam leftists with records of tax avoidance, real-estate speculation, and the Choi-like pulling of strings on relatives’ behalf. This prompted much use of the crypto-Sinitic compound naero nambul, short for “When I cheat, it’s romance, when others do, it’s adultery.”

I recommend reading the whole essay at the link.

It seems like Korean far left is attempting to try and implement their long alleged plan to confederate with North Korea on the terms of the Kim regime:

The fiasco of the ruling Democratic Party correcting its outline of a rewrite of the 1987 Constitution a few hours after its release raises serious concerns about the liberal party’s real motive for pursuing constitutional reform. In its original outline, the party removed the word “free” from Article 4, which defines the national policy direction of pursuing peaceful unification based on basic free democracy principles. The party restored the word “free” four hours later after the outline’s release and claimed it was a typographical error. But skepticism lingered.

The issue of leaving out the word “free” from the democratic order has long been disputed among liberal scholars. As the party’s floor spokeswoman Je Youn-kyung explained, a reunified Korea may not be able to stick to its political system of free democracy once it becomes one with North Korea, which has lived under a socialist system for more than a half a century. The unified Koreas may have to choose a different or unique hybrid system of free or socialist democracy with respect to North Koreans. The constitutional reform drafted by an advisory commission of the National Assembly, which also stirred controversy over being left-leaning, also took out the word “free” in its proposal.   [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but I think this was clearly a trial balloon by the Korean far left to see what the reaction would be.  The Korean far left also want to change the make up of the national parliament to get more left wing politicians inside of it.  Finally, they are pushing to make the South Korean presidency a four year term with the option for a four year reelection.  The Korean far left likely knows that they likely need at least eight years of ROK governmental control to completely transform the government and thus why they are pushing for this.

I guess we will see in the coming months if the ROK public wants to embrace these leftist policies.

Here is the latest update on the status of ex-ROK President Park Geun-hye who continues to be jailed despite not being convicted of anything:

Former President Park Geun-hye, currently facing a criminal trial for conspiring with her friend to receive bribes from conglomerates, is extremely regretful that she was fooled by her longtime confidante, Park’s onetime defense lawyer said Wednesday.

Park was indicted in April 2017 for having abused her power to receive bribes from conglomerates by conspiring with her friend, Choi Soon-sil.

The former president is also charged with leaking confidential information to Choi. She has been boycotting the trial since October, describing the accusations as “political retaliation.”

All her lawyers, including a longtime associate, Yoo Yeong-ha, resigned from the case to protest a judge’s decision to extend her detention to April 2018.

In an interview with the JoongAng Ilbo, Yoo spoke for the first time about the case and his client. It was Yoo’s first media interview since Park was impeached and ousted from presidency in March of last year. The interview took place on Wednesday, and the JoongAng Ilbo published it in Friday’s edition.

Yoo said Park had not known about Choi’s alleged illicit activities when she was president. “The National Intelligence Service, police and the presidential senior secretary for civil affairs never briefed her about Choi,” Yoo said. “She said it is unfortunate that no one informed her about Choi’s activities.”

Park was indicted in April for alleged crimes committed during her failed presidency. Prosecutors said Park, in collusion with Choi, received massive bribes from conglomerates through two cultural and sports foundations Choi practically controlled. Samsung’s contributions to the foundations and generous sponsorship of equestrian training for Choi’s daughter, Chung Yoo-ra, were described as bribes, and Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong was also indicted for offering or promising the president a total of 43.3 billion won ($40.7 million).

Yoo said Park is firm on three key issues surrounding her charges. “Park is firm that she never heard from Choi that Samsung Group offered support for Choi’s daughter’s equestrian training,” Yoo said. “Park is also firm that she never asked Samsung Vice Chairman Lee to support Choi and her daughter. She also stands firm that she never ordered An Chong-bum, then senior economic affairs secretary, to create foundations.”

Regarding the newly added charges that Park had misappropriated the funds of the National Intelligence Service (NIS) and used the money for private purposes, Yoo said the former leader is also innocent on this count. Earlier this month, the prosecution said Park had used 1.5 billion won of misappropriated NIS funds for private affairs, including beauty treatments.

Yoo had visited Park at the Seoul Detention Center after the new charges were added. Speculation was high that Yoo would be rehired, but Park ultimately did not retain him.

“At the beginning of her term, Park was briefed that the Blue House of the previous administrations had received money from the NIS and used it, and there is no legal problem involving the practice,” Yoo said. “She therefore told her officials to do business as usual. She never received any report about spending the NIS money.”

Yoo added, “It’s also not true that Park used the NIS money for private affairs. A president has their own special-activities account. There’s no reason for her to use the NIS money.”

Yoo also said it is unfair to hold Park accountable for the administration’s creation and operation of a blacklist of liberal artists to oppress them and cut their funding just because she was briefed about a plan.

“She doesn’t seem to recall any specific order,” Yoo said. “If you argue that she made a tacit order for something just because she received a briefing about it, it means that presidents will be linked to all sorts of crimes in the future. No administration will be safe, if you use that logic.”  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but on this issue I have yet to see the evidence that Park ever accepted a bribe or knew what Choi was up to.  If this all ends up being smoke and mirrors to get her out of office this is going to cause a precedent that whenever the conservatives take power they will legally go after liberal presidents for real or imagined reasons as well.

If South Korea had a trilateral alliance with Japan it would take away the best political foil that ROK politicians have.  How many times have we seen a ROK politician get into domestic political trouble and then suddenly they show up at Dokdo or push past historical issues:

President Moon Jae-in said Friday military cooperation with the United States and Japan is needed to rein in the rising threat from North Korea but was skeptical over elevating it to a trilateral defense alliance.

“South Korea-U.S. military cooperation as well as Japan has become important, but the cooperation is aimed at countering North Korea’s nuclear and missile provocations,” Moon said an interview with Singapore’s Channel NewsAsia at his office. “But I don’t think it is appropriate to develop the cooperation to a level of (trilateral) military alliance.”

Japan has increasingly sought a bigger international role in global military conflicts in recent years against China’s growing assertiveness in Asia. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is reconsidering its traditionally pacifist stance on defense in the face of threats from Pyongyang, which has shot two missiles over Japanese territory in the recent months.

“If Japan uses a nuclear-armed North Korea as an excuse for its military expansion, it would not be appropriate for ASEAN nations as well.”  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.