``Excluding Political Eunds from the Money Laundering Prevention Law``

The ruling and opposition parties agreed to allow the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to have unregulated access to tracing bank accounts suspected of being used for laundering, while excluding political funds from the Money Laundering Prevention Law yesterday. It is anticipated that the civic organizations will harshly criticize and oppose this saying that the political circles have excluded political funds from being subjects to the Money Laundering Prevention Law to protect themselves.

Three floor leaders said that the ruling-opposition parties held a meeting and agreed to exclude `violation of political funds` from being subject to a bill of regulation and punishment for illegal wealth gains and hiding, which is one of two bills concerning the Money Laundering Prevention Law. With regard to the FIU, the meeting decided to legislate the FIU law, which allows the FIU to have unregulated access to tracing bank accounts, following the suggestion by the government and the National Assembly’s finance and economy committee. The ruling-opposition parties planned to pass the two bills on June 19 through the procedure of confirmation in the parties.

As a complementary measure to the agreement among three floor leaders, the Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) decided to add a bill by which the laundering of the political funds is subject to the regulation and punishment by revising the political funds law. Lee Jong-Gul vice-floor leader said at the interview that ``we plan to establish a new regulation to prohibit and punish the laundering of the political funds in the existing political funds law. We also decide to proceed with the revision of the political funds law to allow the prosecution to investigate the laundering of the political funds like other crimes.``

Meanwhile, Choi Han-Soo, executive secretary of the Department of the Transparency of the Society at the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, criticized saying that ``the ruling-opposition parties have admitted through this agreement that they do not intend to clean up the ugly relation between politics and economics, which was the principal offender of the foreign exchange crisis. It is meaningless to endow the FIU the right to have unregulated access to tracing bank accounts while excluding the `violation of the political funds`.``

Moon Chul fullmoon@donga.com