[Editorial] Prosecutors inspire no confidence

We thought things would turn out differently. Even when Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) chairman Kim Joong-Kwon and other ruling party leaders made public statements about fundraising scandal as if they had known the results of the ongoing investigations into the diversion of state intelligence agency funds for campaign purposes all along, we believed the information was not based on tips by the prosecution.

So we urged restraint on the part of the political circles to avoid using the case as partisan ammunition.

However, our expectations of the prosecution went up in smoke in a moment. How should we look at the release to the press of a roster of politicians who allegedly received money out of the state intelligence agency's funds at the time of April 11, 1996, general elections, in the name of "material prepared by the investigative authorities."

One might safely assume that the prosecutors had been working with the ruling party closely all this while.

The prosecution contends that it was not prepared or made available by the prosecution authority for it had not made the list of politicians and the amounts of money they received, arranged in a neat diagram. Yet it claims that the contents are not wrong. The contents of the investigation that had been delivered to the ruling party freely must have been made under a table in some quarters and then leaked.

The names of the blacklisted politicians and the sums of money given them never could have been ascertained except by the prosecution's tracking of bank accounts.

As it turned out, what the governing party gave out as the prosecution in a few days confirmed a passing remark. The confirmed blacklist first mentioned by MDP chairman Kim turned out to be true at last. The role of prosecutors in the interplay cannot be denied.

The scandal took a critical turn as the list containing mostly opposition politicians was made public one day after Prosecutor General Park Sun-Yong vowed a fair probe, warning against the abuse of the case as a political and partisan weapon.

In a word, the prosecution violated our trust completely. Who can ever trust investigations by such prosecutors?

The prosecution used to keep mum on a slate of scandals on the pretext of not confirming a case whose criminal counts is yet to be laid bare. This time it released a list of accused politicians deemed hardly punishable on criminal counts. Even though it did not give out the list directly, the circumstances make it difficult for the prosecution to avoid accounting for the outcome.

It needs no reiteration that the diversion of taxpayers¡¯ money allocated to the national intelligence service for campaign funding cannot be excused. In case the prosecution had worked politically in league with the ruling party in the course of looking into the case, it is a problem more serious then embezzlement of official budget in terms of the constitutional principle of state.

The prosecution authorities are required to fully clarify the progress of the scandal investigation and shape up now.