Warrant Against Lee Jae-Kwan Requested Today

Special investigation headquarter for public fund corruption has summoned former Saehan Group vice-chairman, Lee Jae-Kwan, on the 11th, and is investigating him under the charge of manipulating 150 billion won worth of accounts through false accounting and receiving illegal loans worth 100 billion won.

The prosecution is to request Lee’s warrant on the 12th with charges of law-violation against external inspection and fraud under special economic crime laws, after investigating the route and exact scale of the false accounting and diversion of the loans.

The prosecution is also to summon former vice-chairman of Saehan Inc., Han Hyeong-Su, and former Saehan Media president, Kim Sung-Jae, and issue warrants against them along with Lee.

A Saehan authority said on the 11th, “Former vice-chairman Lee has taken full responsibility of the company’s bankruptcy, and presented his 21 billion won worth of possession, which includes estates inherited from his parents, to the company.”

Thanks to the stead growth of the U.S. economy in 1990s, the interest rate has remained in stable and the stock market recorded 20-30 percent growth per year. Since then, the insurance customers have preferred the variable universal insurance.

Recently, variable pension products rather than regular fixed pension products are winning absolute popularity. 74 percent of the total pension products sold in the U.S. in 1999 (163.5 billion dollars) were composed of variable pension products (121.8 billion dollars). The insurance experts are anticipating that such trend will continue on for a while.

Meanwhile, Japanese insurance companies also issuing new products of variable insurances since the U.S. Equitable Insurance introduced the variable insurance products to Japan in 1986.

The variable insurance market had been growing rapidly by the prosperity of Japanese stock market until 1989 but the variable insurance market in Japan has been stagnated since then by the burst of Japanese bubble economy during 1990s.

The largest life insurance company in Japan, the Japan`s Life Insurance, newly introduced the products of the variable insurance in 1999 and began its marketing from October last year but it seems too early to decide whether it would be successful in the Japanese market for now.

Soo-Hyung Lee sooh@donga.com