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Special Prosecutor Park Young-soo answers reporters’ questions as he arrives at his office in Seoul’s Seocho district

“We’re going to start over from scratch to figure out the fundamental nature of the Mir and K-Sports Foundations. We’ll have to look at what presidential power went into compelling corporations to donate to the foundations,” said Park Young-soo, the special prosecutor who is investigating the Choi Sun-sil scandal, on Dec. 2. This means that Park Young-soo will be exploring whether President Park Geun-hye can be charged with bribery in connection with the 77.4 billion won in compulsory donations to the two foundations. On Dec. 2, Park Young-soo gave the Blue House his recommendations for eight candidates for special assistant prosecutor.

“There seem to be quite a few issues with concluding that the fundraising for the foundations fundamentally represents an abuse of power. Sometimes it can be better to approach an issue head on than to come at it from an angle,” Park Young-soo told reporters on Dec. 2.

“President Park will argue that the fundraising for the foundations was an ‘act of governance’ designed to promote culture, and the success of this investigation will depend on how we can refute that argument,” he said.

During her three statements to the public and remarks by her spokesperson, Park Geun-hye has insisted on her innocence and has argued that her meeting with chaebol chairmen to convince them to donate to the foundations was “a legitimate exercise of her governing powers” and that the chaebol donations were “voluntary.” Park Young-soo’s remarks suggest that he intends to seriously consider charging Park with third-person bribery. To do so, he will need to determine whether there was some kind of quid pro quo behind the establishment of the foundations, which Park Geun-hye claims was merely an exercise of her presidential powers.

“We’ll have to look at how the chaebols gave large sums of money and whether President Park played a role in that, or in other words what presidential powers were at the bottom of this,” Park Young-soo said.

During his tenure as a prosecutor, Park Young-soo led successful investigations into slush funds at Hyundai Motor Company and accounting fraud at SK, and he indicated that he will be just as firm in his investigation of big business this time around: “It’s also important to investigate the companies that donated to the two foundations. We’re going to look into them one by one and leave no stones unturned.”

The prosecutors’ special office of investigations, which handled the investigation into the Choi Sun-sil influence-peddling scandal, concluded that it could not charge anyone with bribery for the 77.4 billion won in donations. Instead, the investigators only looked at bribery charges in connection to the large amount of money (10 billion won) that Samsung gave to Choi and her daughter Jung Yu-ra and the additional donations to the foundations made by Lotte and SK with the aim of being selected to operate more duty-free stores.

Park Young-soo chose Yun Seok-yeol, a prosecutor in Daejeon, to lead the team of investigators the day before, and now he has also offered a basic outline of the team of investigators who will support his goal of filing charges of bribery. “We’re going to look over the prosecutors’ previous investigation record from scratch. We’ll also mostly be choosing fresh faces for the team of investigators. I’m planning for only one-third of the total [20] prosecutors on assignment to be prosecutors who worked on the previous investigation team so that we can discuss things from a different angle,” he said. In other words, Park Young-soo intends to conduct an entirely new investigation and reach conclusions without being constrained by the findings of the previous investigation.

Park said that he does not intend for the prosecutors on assignment to include any of the senior prosecutors who were involved in the investigation and legal decisions at the special office of investigations. He also said that he is planning to appoint two lawyers who are former judges as special assistant prosecutors. His goal is to view the investigation not only from the perspective of the prosecutors but also from the perspective of judges, since they make the final decision about a defendant’s guilt or innocence. There is legal precedent in similar cases of courts convicting people of third-party bribery.

Given Park Young-soo’s resolve to investigate bribery charges, there is growing interest about the method he will use to question Park Geun-hye. “Answering questions in writing is like looking at the answer sheet before taking a test. We will question her in person and not question her in writing. If necessary, I might question her myself,” he said.

“There’s a lot of controversy about whether Park Geun-hye will be forced to cooperate with the investigation,” Park Young-soo said in an interview on a CBS radio program on Dec. 2. “If that’s what the people want, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

Park Young-soo is also planning to make full use of a clause in the Special Prosecutor Act (which has largely been ignored by previous special prosecutors) that enables him to investigate additional suspicions that come to light along the way. He said he would also look into allegations about what Park was doing during the first seven hours after the 2014 Sewol ferry sinking, which he describes as “one of the biggest accusations brought by the people.”

Park Young-soo also pledged to investigate whether the presidential security office and the security chief had broken any laws when they brought large amounts of injectable doses of placenta extract into the Blue House without the permission of the president’s doctor. An investigation of the security office could lead to questions about Choi Sun-sil’s unauthorized visits to the Blue House.

Park Young-soo also said that he would consider several ways of bringing Choi’s daughter Jung Yu-ra (who is reportedly still in Germany) back to South Korea for questioning, such as working with the German criminal and judicial authorities. On Dec. 2, Park recommended eight lawyers who are former prosecutors and judges as candidates for special assistant prosecutor. Park Geun-hye must appoint four of these candidates as special assistant prosecutors within three days.

By Kim Nam-il, staff reporter

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