hankyoreh

Yangpyeong County’s Byeongsan village on the afternoon of July 9. (Shin So-young/The Hankyoreh)

Questions about an alteration to the course of the Seoul-Yangpyeong Expressway were not dispelled by an explanation on Monday from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT).

That day, the ministry belatedly presented “explanatory materials” on the expressway in question. According to those materials, the plan for having the township of Gangsang as the final stop was first presented in May 2022.

At the time, the MOLIT and Korea Expressway Corporation had already launched a feasibility survey on the project to connect Seoul and Yangpyeong the preceding March. According to this information, the plan to have Gangsang as the final destination was presented in May by Donghae Engineering and Consultants, the company responsible for the design.

So far, the explanation has been that Yangpyeong County named Gangsang as the final destination after the MOLIT requested a review in July 2022. Now it has emerged that the design company commissioned by the MOLIT gave that plan as an alternative two months earlier.

After consistently maintaining that it altered the final stop of the expressway “at the request of Yangpyeong County,” the ministry has now belatedly admitted that it had elided over the part that came before that.

According to the ministry, the change of the final stop to a place where first lady Kim Keon-hee’s family just happens to own land was a superior alternative to the pre-feasibility survey plan in terms of both traffic distribution effects and economic feasibility.

One has to ask what the MOLIT was doing for the six years it had been pursuing the expressway project before it suddenly made this discovery once the Yoon Suk-yeol administration took office. The timing of the change coincided with the administration’s official launch, and the new location turns out to be a place where the president’s wife’s family owns a lot of land.

The Seoul-Yangpyeong Expressway project is a state effort with a cost of 1.8 trillion won, for which a pre-feasibility survey had already been carried out. It makes complete sense that people would be asking questions about why the final destination was altered, what the procedure behind the change was, whether those responsible knew that Kim’s family owned land at the new site, and whether that had anything to do with the decision to change the destination.

On Monday, the MOLIT claimed that it did not learn about Kim’s family’s land being near the site until June 29 of this year.

It was in December 2021 that the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police conducted a search and seizure on the Yangpyeong County Office while investigating allegations that Yoon’s mother-in-law Choi Eun-soon received preferential treatment in a development project in the county’s Gongheung area.

During the election campaign, the Democratic Party disclosed register copies for five lots in Yangpyeong’s Byeongsan village, providing circumstantial evidence that Kim’s family was in violation of the Real Estate Registration Act. This is the Kim family gravesite land that is at issue now.

The current minister of land, infrastructure and transport is Won Hee-ryong, who headed the policy headquarters for the ruling party’s election committee at the time. Shortly after the MOLIT announced the “strategic environmental impact assessment” altering the final destination of the Seoul-Yangpyeong expressway to Gangsang on May 8, it was reported in the press that former PPP lawmaker Kim Sun-kyo had allegedly been involved in the decision to change the destination to a region where Yoon’s mother-in-law owned land.

Is the South Korean public expected to buy that Won Hee-ryong was completely in the dark about this?

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]