“Step down, Park Geun-hye!”
Later that day, I spoke with a South Korean lawyer involved in politics.
“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “Korea is vomiting out the legacy of military
rule.” Authoritarian rule had ended in 1987, he said, but its legacy remained
in the ties between people like President Park and Jay Lee.
Ten days after the story broke, prosecutors detained Choi after her
return from Germany. The tentacle-like reach of the corruption and
cronyism was becoming clearer from the evidence that was seized,
ensnaring virtually the entire Republic of Samsung government itself.
“It is hard to forgive myself and sleep at night with feelings of sorrow,”
President Park Geun-hye announced, her voice trembling.
But it was too late for apologies. An investigation spread across the
highest levels of government and business. On November 8 prosecutors
raided the Samsung Electronics building in Gangnam, leaving the building
with boxes stuffed with documents.
Two weeks later, prosecutors descended on the National Pension
Service in another raid, ransacking its offices and leaving with more stacks
of papers and documents, followed by the government body connected to
it, the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
“We raided the NPS and the health ministry to see if the NPS voted in
favor of Samsung’s merger last year according to a normal process,”
declared a special prosecutor.
“We got phone calls from people complaining that the NPS was wasting
people’s money,” a pension-service staffer later told me.
The head of the pension service’s investment committee, Hong Wan-
sun, and the closely linked minister of health and welfare, Moon Hyung-
pyo, were quickly put on trial, found guilty, and imprisoned seven months
later, sentenced to two and a half years for political interference.
“The fact that a Health Ministry official used pressure to damage the
independence of the state pension fund is highly reproachable,” the judges
said in their ruling.
In South Korea the consensus was that this would result in the sacking
of a few Samsung executives.
“Jay Lee?” a business analyst passing through Seoul asked me. “They’re
not gonna arrest him. He’s way too powerful.”
Jay Lee’s father, after all, had been in similar straits almost ten years