Tag: Lee Myung-bak

If half of the corruption allegations against former President Lee Myung-bak are true, then it looks like he may be in some serious trouble:

Troubled shipbuilder Sungdong Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering was the source of bribes former President Lee Myung-bak allegedly accepted from a banker, sources from the prosecution said Friday.

Lee, who was in office from 2008 to 2013, is being investigated over various corruption accusations. Of the 20 charges he is facing, one is an allegation that he had accepted a total of 2.25 billion won ($2.12 million) from Lee Pal-sung, then-chairman of Woori Financial Group, from 2007 until 2011. The banker allegedly paid the money to keep his job during Lee’s presidency.

According to prosecution sources, a memo was found in Lee Pal-sung’s home during a raid last month. It detailed his payments to Lee’s family, including the former president’s son-in-law.

The money came from Sungdong Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering, which was in serious financial trouble at the time, the prosecution sources said. The midsize shipbuilder was established in 2003 but its financial situation deteriorated in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial meltdown. Up to now, the firm received 9.3 trillion won in bailouts, but has not been turned around. The government decided earlier this month to let the company file for court receivership.

Lawyers of the former president said Friday that Lee told the prosecution during questioning earlier this week that he had no knowledge of the bribery.

The JoongAng Ilbo reported Friday that the prosecution has secured testimony from a former CEO of auto component maker DAS that former President Lee accepted large amounts of secret funds from the company for years.

According to sources from the legal community, the prosecution suspects that Lee had took about 3.5 billion won from DAS. The auto parts maker is technically owned by Lee’s elder brother, but prosecutors believe that Lee is the actual owner.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

Former President Lee Myung-bak (C) arrives at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors Office on March 14, 2018, to be grilled as a suspect over a string of corruption allegations that include bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power. (Yonhap)

A protester holds placards that read “Arrest Lee Myung-bak” in front of the residence of former President Lee Myung-bak in Seoul’s Gangnam Ward on March 6, 2018. The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office subpoenaed Lee to come to the office for questioning as a suspect on March 14 over a string of suspicions of bribery and other irregularities. (Yonhap)

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.

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.

Former President Lee Myung-bak is pictured in front of his office in Seoul on Jan. 22, 2018, amid reports that posecution investigators raided the residence and office of Lee Sang-deuk, an elder brother of the former president, as part of a probe into allegations that the elder Lee accepted illicit money from the state spy agency. (Yonhap)

Former President Lee Myung-bak speaks during a press conference at his office in Seoul on Jan. 17, 2018. Lee strongly protested prosecutors’ investigation of his former aides, denouncing it as “political retaliation” and urging prosecutors to take him on directly without harassing aides. (Yonhap)

Protesters create the message “Arrest MB” with candles during a rally in downtown Seoul on Oct. 21, 2017. MB refers to former President Lee Myung-bak, who is accused of oppressing the media, artists, politicians and other prominent figures critical of him, using the intelligence agency as the controlling tool. Oct. 29 marks the first anniversary of the candlelight protest that led to the ouster of Lee’s successor, Park Geun-hye. (Yonhap)

Considering how long this has dragged out I am still waiting for the definitive evidence that Park Geun-hye was helping Choi Soon-sil shake people down for money for her daughter’s equestrian training.  Until the definitive evidence is shown then Park has a point that this is “political revenge”.

Former President Park Geun-hye said Monday that she has “lost faith” in the nation’s justice system, claiming she is nothing but a victim of political revenge.

Her remarks came during a hearing at the Seoul Central District Court after it decided last week to extend her detention for another six months.

“I was supposed to be released today,” she said during the hearing at the court. “But the court issued another arrest warrant ... I can’t accept its decision.”

In protest of the decision, her lawyers resigned the same day.

“My lawyers and I felt helpless,” she said. “I have lost faith that the court will do a fair job in accordance with the Constitution and conscience.”

This was the first time she has spoken publicly since her trial began six months ago. After being ousted and arrested in March over a massive influence-peddling scandal involving her friend Choi Soon-sil, she barely said anything except yes or no whenever cameras were around.

Park insisted on her innocence, saying, “I did not comply with requests to favor anyone while in office. ” She also claimed the trial has shown that various suspicions surrounding her are false.

Then, in an apparent message aimed at President Moon Jae-in, the rival candidate she beat in the 2012 presidential election, and his governing Democratic Party of Korea, Park claimed she is just a victim of political strife.

“I hope I will be the last victim of political revenge in the name of the rule of law,” she said.

“The last six months have been a horrible and miserable time for me. I had trust in a person who later betrayed me. As a result, I have lost my honor and everything else in life.”  [Korea Times]

You can read the rest at the link, but the Korean left has been going after former conservative President Lee Myung-bak as well to get him thrown in jail.  The Korean left has longed blamed conservatives for uncovering former President Roh Moo-hyun’s corruption which led to his suicide shortly after his presidency.

Former President Lee Myung-bak (C) leaves his office in Seoul on Sept. 28, 2017, in this image taken from Yonhap News TV. Lee castigated President Moon Jae-in’s sweeping campaign to address the alleged misdeeds of previous governments. “I am watching these events unfolding in the name of eliminating the accumulated ills surrounding the previous governments, when the security situation is grave and people’s livelihoods are difficult,” Lee, who led the country from 2008-2013, wrote on Facebook the same day. (Yonhap)