I FIRST MET KIM Yong-chul in September 2016, at a modest municipal
government office in his hometown of Gwangju, a city on South Korea’s
southeastern rice bowl. It’s a region known for its political protests and its
resentment of Samsung and the company’s conservative political allies.
Yong-chul didn’t ordinarily grant interviews. He was one of the
country’s most famous prosecutors. As a prosecutor, before working for
Samsung, he got the former dictator Chun Doo-hwan and President Roh
Tae-woo convicted of corruption in 1997. In South Korea prosecutors
enjoy a great deal of prestige and have enormous legal power. They have
the ability to open investigations without the involvement of the police. But
South Korean prosecutors often have political ambitions as well. Corporate
executives have access to them, offering them lucrative positions at chaebol
groups when they leave office.
Yong-chul greeted me in a conference room and gave me a wheat tea.
As a foreign journalist, I was suspect, he made clear to me. For all his
public challenges against the nation’s most powerful company, Mr. Kim
was still a Korean patriot who didn’t want to smear his country’s good
name.
“I live in Korea. I like Korea,” I reassured him. “I’ve been here for four
years.”
Hired in 1997 as a top legal aide at Samsung, where he worked for
seven years, Yong-chul was living the dream in the Republic of Samsung.
He drove an Audi and had a posh apartment in the upscale Gangnam
neighborhood. Prospective political allies clamored to meet him, setting up
appointments with him as much as two years in advance, he claimed.
But he’d been unable to stomach the illegal activities that he found at
Samsung, and ultimately quit. In October 2007 Yong-chol teamed up with a
group of activist Catholic priests, who had credibility for their role in
Korea’s prodemocracy movement in the 1980s, for a series of press
conferences in Seoul, at which he made explosive allegations against his
former employer.
At those press gatherings over two months, he claimed that Chairman
Lee had stolen billions of dollars from Samsung affiliates and stashed it in
bank accounts under the names of Samsung employees, including Kim’s
own name. Kim claimed his former employer was managing a $215 million
slush fund to bribe influential figures.
This was a far more damaging allegation than the price-fixing scandal in