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Lawyer Park Young-soo responds to reporters’ questions at his office in Seoul’s Seocho district

“My heart is heavy with the weight of the job I have been given during this critical time for our country,” said Park Young-soo in a meeting with reporters on Nov. 30. Park has been appointed Special Prosecutor in an investigation of the Choi Sun-sil scandal, in which President Park Geun-hye is implicated. “I will carry out a thorough investigation in keeping with laws and principles without making any allowances for political interests,” he said.

Park Young-soo also addressed concerns that the investigation would be compromised by his alleged friendship with former Blue House Senior Secretary for Civil Affairs Woo Byung-woo, who is one of the key subjects of the investigation: “That will have no effect on the investigation. The results of the investigation will speak for themselves.”

When asked whether Park Geun-hye would be forced to cooperate with the investigation, Park Young-soo said, “We’ll have to investigate her, but I don’t want to jump to any conclusions.”

Park Young-soo’s first order of business is to put together a mammoth team of more than 100 staff members. The Special Prosecutor Act enables Park to hire up to 105 people (including the special prosecutor himself, with the rank of High Prosecutors’ Office head: four special assistant prosecutors with experience as judges, prosecutors or lawyers (equivalent in rank to District Prosecutors’ Office head), 20 prosecutors on assignment, 40 special investigators with experience as lawyers (between levels 3 and 5 in rank) and 40 public servants on assignment from the prosecutors, the police and the tax service. This is the second largest of the 11 special investigations to date in terms of the total number of staff, following the special investigation into president-elect Lee Myung-bak’s involvement with the BBK scandal in early 2008, which had a team of 106 people, including the special prosecutor.

Twenty prosecutors will be assigned to Park Young-soo’s team, which is the same size as a District Prosecutors’ Office. This is double the 10 prosecutors that were assigned to the BBK special investigation, which had been the greatest number until that point. In terms of the number of prosecutors, this is equivalent to those assigned to Jeju Island’s District Prosecutors’ Office.

During the BBK special investigation, the head of the team of investigators had the rank of senior prosecutor, but the view of the prosecutors this time around is that the team should be led by a District Prosecutors’ Office head who has experience heading up investigations in big cases. The special prosecutor will need to skillfully mobilize 20 prosecutors to investigate multiple suspects simultaneously during the short period of time available to him.

In the past, the prosecutors on assignment were selected according to the year they graduated from the Judicial Research and Training Institute and their place of birth. Some held that prosecutors with the special office of investigations that managed to bring criminal charges against Park ought to be assigned to the special prosecutors’ team. But since the task of a special prosecutor is to dig deeper than what the regular prosecutors were able to find, the prevailing view is that prosecutors who were part of the decision to charge Park with abuse of power and extortion, but not bribery, in her compulsory fundraising for the Mir and K-Sports Foundations would have trouble contradicting their own findings.

“Some of the people who were involved with or who were receiving reports or giving orders in investigations into leaked documents concerning Chung Yoon-hoi in 2013 and into Woo Byung-woo this year could end up being investigated by the special prosecutor. As such, they will probably be ineligible to be assigned as prosecutors to this team,” said a source with the prosecutors.

Since the Special Prosecutor Act instructs the special prosecutor to recruit his team and to set up his office within 20 days of being appointed, Park Young-soo will probably be able to kick off the actual investigation around Dec. 20.

By Kim Nam-il, staff reporter

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