Roh’s Campaign Collected 4 Billion From “Big 5”

More politicians of both ruling and opposing parties are calling for extensive inspection of the presidential election funds.

Uri Party held a high-officials meeting on October 30 and demanded that the prosecution should disclose all the illegal activities related to the funds “through a full-fledged and unlimited investigation on all political parties, whether it be tracking accounts or seizure and search.”

Chairman Choe Byung-yul of the Grand National Party said at the standing committee meeting, “Asking for special council inspection on this matter is to clarify the suspicions so that such illegal campaign funding will never take place again.“

Millennium Democratic Party’s Chung Kyu-hwan also demanded a thorough investigation by the prosecution and said, “Whether it be on the ruling party or the opposing party, if the prosecution does not do its job properly, the special council should take over the responsibility of probing.”

In the meantime, Uri Party’s Lee claimed that MDP had collected at least 4 billion won in total from the “big five” corporations, including SK and Samsung. Concerning this, a new suspicion surfaced that about 2.1 billion won worth of last year’s campaign funding in MDP’s Cheju office had vanished.

He said at the press conference, “At the SK slush fund interrogation on October 14, the prosecution knew that the bank account holding SK-donated one billion won had a total deposit of five billion won, including the SK slush fund. They also knew which companies are involved.” According to Lee, one billion won of donation to the MDP came in through the account of Cheju Supporters’ Association, and the total donation collected through the association is 5 billion won, which is 2.089 billion won more that what is reported to the Central Election Administration Committee.

Lee also said, “The five billion-won account held only SK’s donation (of one billion won) and that of some other companies like Poongsan and Doosan. Donations from other ‘big five’ companies (Samsung, LG, Hyundai Motors, Lotte) were not kept in that account,” suggesting that MDP had collected a minimum of four billion won from companies aside from the five major companies. If his claims are true, the money MDP’s election campaign collected from companies including the “big five” (seven billion won) would reach 11 billion won.