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staff photographer)

By Seong Yeon-cheol, staff reporter 　

Park Geun-hye spent most of the Oct. 21 press conference praising the efforts of the Jeongsu Scholarship Foundation. She also explained that she no longer has anything to do with the foundation or the current controversy surrounding it.

Observers said the New Frontier Party (NFP) presidential candidate’s comments were something of a step backward, confounding expectations from NFP members and associates who predicted, as a key secretariat member put it, that she would express a more “forward-looking perspective.” It was also said that the candidate let herself fall into a trap of self-contradiction at the press conference by failing to get her facts straight.

Park mentioned her previous service as chairperson of the foundation. “For that reason, I can say with confidence that the Jeongsu Scholarship Foundation is being run as a model organization, cleaner than the other foundations out there,” she said.

She went on to say that ten years of scrutiny by the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations, as well as a recent audit by then-Seoul commissioner of education Kwak No-hyun, had failed to turn up evidence of any problems. “That’s how a clean operation it is,” she said.

“If there had been any corruption, the authorities would have already brought every means in their disposal to bear in applying pressure,” Park said.

Her remarks echoed previous claims from 2004, during her tenure as president of the Grand National Party (the predecessor of the current NFP), that the furor over the foundation was a politicized campaign by her opponents. Park also indicated her displeasure in July of this year, saying, “During President Roh Moo-hyun’s time in office, they did everything they could to find problems [with the foundation], and they couldn’t. Could that really have been because [the administration] lacked the power to do so?”

Park reiterated her own lack of involvement with the foundation’s operations. “There is no truth whatsoever to the opposition’s claims that the Jeongsu Scholarship Foundation is my property or that it is involved in political campaigning on my behalf,” she said.

But the candidate went on to contradict herself toward the end of the conference, demanding that the foundation take corrective action. Specifically, she called on the chairman and directors to show greater transparency and offer a “solution to the public” to avoid “being used any longer as political weapons or leaving grounds for the public to be suspicious.”

“I would ask the directors to make a proper determination on everything, including the nomenclature, so that the foundation takes on a new life as a public interest organization,” Park said.

Observers said the candidate seemed to be working to furnish an alibi of sorts for herself, claiming the foundation was being run transparently and without any involvement by her while also demanding action as a nod to the public outcry.

Park was tight-lipped about the recent furor over the foundation’s selling of its shares and support in elections in the Busan/South Gyeongsang area. “I don’t know the details,” she said. “We need to see a conclusion emerge [from Jeongsu] fairly and transparently as a public interest foundation.”

However, the candidate did deny allegations that the foundation was created through the forcible divesting of Kim Ji-tae’s Buil Scholarship Foundation, arguing that it was created as an entirely new organization.

“It did include assets donated by Mr. Kim, but it was newly created with donations and support from benefactors here in Korea, as well as overseas Koreans,” she explained.

Park attacked Kim as “someone who was denounced for corruption at the time of the April Revolution [a popular uprising in 1960] and had a seven-year sentence requested for him on corruption charges” at the time of the May 16 coup d’etat that put her father Park Chung-hee in power.

According to the candidate, Kim announced his intent to give away his assets, and finally donated his shares in the Busan Ilbo newspaper and the MBC network, in order to avoid punishment.

But Park showed a shaky grip on the most basic facts of the case. During her Q&A session, she declared no fewer than four times that the court had ruled against the plaintiff in a suit by Kim’s family demanding the return of the stocks, arguing that it could not recognize the Buil Foundation as having been coercively divested from Kim.

In February, Seoul Central District Court said in its ruling for the defendants that it recognized Kim as having been coerced by the government into donating his foundation’s shares in the newspaper and network, but that the statute of limitations for his family to demand their return had elapsed.

This led to something of a sideshow after the press conference, when Park was shown an article explaining this by public information team chief Lee Jeong-hyeon. The candidate proceeded to take the microphone once again and say she “misspoke when I said there was no coercion.”

Previously, the candidate drew heavy flak in September when she talked about “two different rulings” on the execution of members of the reconstruction committee for the People’s Revolution Party, referring to one ruling during her father’s Yushin government in 1974 and another not-guilty ruling in a 2007 retrial. Critics charged her with repudiating the judicial system.

While speaking with reporters just after Park’s press conference, Jeongsoo Scholarship Fund chairman Choi Pil-lip denied all of Park’s claims, including her claim of his wanting to retire.

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