Democratic Party Considering the Election Fund Documents Opening

Park Sang-chon, a representative of the Democratic Party, insisted on expanding the investigation by expressing on October 28, that large corporations, except SK, should be included in the investigation of the presidential election funds if they are found to have offered the funds.

In a telephone interview with Park the same day, he said, “It is realistically difficult to investigate all the corporations to find out who are involved and as a result, innocent companies can get hurt because of this. However, the investigation is necessary if anything is found to be related to the funds or to contain a clue related to the investigation.”

Chung Gyoon-hwan, minority leader of the National Assembly, insisted in a CBS radio program the same day saying, “During the presidential election, I heard that Representative Kim Won-gi and Lee Sang-su have been in charge [of the funds]. I heard that they took care of the transactions by the corporations.” Chung added, “They had taken some private accountants in the party and excluded the party’s responsible organization. When they withdrew from the party, they had taken the account book with them. There are files that the Democratic Party keeps within the party. I will announce it later.”

The Budget Special Committee of the Democratic Party, headed by Noh Gwan-gyu, which has been pressing on the auditing of the last presidential election funds, is actively considering the means of publicizing the related documents after the report to the Supreme Council on October 29. Chang Juhn-hyug, deputy spokesperson announced, “Central Investigation Department of the Supreme Public Prosecutors’ Office has requested for documents related to the ‘dual account book’ of the then candidate Roh’s camp, and we will decide after discussing with the Supreme Committee as to whether or not to hand in the documents.”

Related to this, Lee Sang-su, former chief of the general affairs department of the then Democratic Party at the time of the presidential election, and currently general affairs director at the Open Woori Party said at a press gathering, “During the presidential election, the largest amount of the funds, which was 2.5 billion won, came from SK, who is among the top five largest corporations, and 1.5 billion won from the second corporation, and less than one billion won from the rest of the corporations,” refuting the suspicion of the Democratic Party. He also said, “The top five corporations indicate that Samsung, LG, SK, Hyundai Motors, and Lotte were involved. The funds raised from these corporations never exceeded 7.5 billion won,” and responded to the dual account book suspicion, “There is no dual account book by any chance.” Meanwhile, Representative Kim Gyeon-jae from the Grand National Party met the press the same day and said, “I think a special investigation should take care of this dual account book case of the Roh’s camp as well.”

Representative Choi added, “On October 16, I met with the president and said that the prosecution will not feel comfortable since it relates to the president himself. Politically judging the investigation of the GNP in relation to the SK secret fund, it is 98-99 percent complete, so now is the proper time to hand it over to the Special Investigation.”

Sung-Won Park Yeon-Wook Jung swpark@donga.com jyw11@donga.com