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| 'South Korea's Enron': Investigators in a corruption probe seized documents from Samsung Securities' Seoul headquarters on
Friday. Han Jae-Ho/Reuters |
As Samsung investigation continues, South Koreans face up to their 'tradition' of graft
Prosecutors cleared presidential candidate Lee Myung Bak on Wednesday. But the corruption case against Samsung, the country's largest company, continues.
By Donald Kirk | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the December 6, 2007 edition
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Seoul, South Korea - In a culture accustomed to bribery and payoffs, corporate and political scandals are so common that Koreans tend to shrug them off. Still, asks Kim Hae-suu, an office manager, "When can we stop seeing this kind of disgraceful news?"
The decision of prosecutors Wednesday not to press charges against the conservative Lee Myung Bak, front-runner in the campaign for election as president on December 19, was hardly consoling. "The prosecutors don't want to be on the wrong side if he wins," says Ms. Kim. "They want to stay out of trouble. I'm sure that psychology worked."
For many Koreans, the scandal surrounding Mr. Lee, a former business leader who won respect and popularity as mayor of Seoul for revamping traffic and beautifying the downtown, fits in with a pattern of corruption that also periodically ensnares the country's business empires, most recently the biggest of them all, the Samsung group.
In such an atmosphere, the proliferation of scandals raises the question of whether this fast-growing society is hopelessly mired in corruption or going through a phase it may eventually outgrow.
"This is kind of a Korean tradition," says Park Nei-hei, who is an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and a member of the board of the Samsung Corp., the group's trading arm. Mr. Park senses "a strong desire for change" but says that "nobody's free from corruption." He agrees that prosecutors looking into Lee's past were "concerned with his possible victory."
Lee, cleared in an investigation in which a one-time business partner was indicted for embezzling more than $40 million, appears likely to solidify his lead in polls that show he'll get 40 percent of the votes, twice as many as his nearest rival. Still, his leftist foe, Chung Dong Young, a former unification minister dedicated to the government's policy of rapprochement with North Korea, calls the decision "void" and promises to keep looking for evidence.
One explanation for pervasive – and seemingly tolerated – high-level graft in South Korean business comes from the country's rapid, relatively unregulated growth of the past several decades. The engines of that economic ascent are the sprawling business groups, called chaebol, that form the historic backbone of Korea's economy. The chaebol's profligate spending habits were largely responsible for having forced the South Korean government, 10 years ago this week, to appeal to the International Monetary Fund for a $58 billion bailout.
"Maybe it's the rapid development of the past decade," says Koh Il-dong, senior fellow at the Korea Development Institute, a government-affiliated think tank. In the past, says Mr. Koh, "We didn't have regulations and rules, and lots of transactions, gifts were taken for granted as good social custom."
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