When you are in politics, email servers are not your only concern. Tablets are a mine of information if you are stupid enough to leave one lying around. And it is a Samsung Galaxy tablet that is at the heart of South Korea's biggest political scandal for a great many years.
Anyone reading the newspapers will know that another democratically elected President in Asia is now in deep shit. Huge demonstrations that she step down are now getting even bigger by the day. Whether she can remain in office till the end of her term at the end of next year is seriously in doubt.
Corruption in Korean politics both before and after military rule is more or less the norm. Every President and/or his family have been indicted for major fraud after stepping down. This time, though, the corruption seems to have seeped into the President's very consciousness and it is this that makes the case so different. Koreans are used to fraud - but not this.
President Park Geun-hye came to office 4 years ago. Her father was the military dictator of South Korea until he was assassinated by the head of the Korean CIA in 1979. 4 years earlier, a North Korean spy had shot her mother - her father having been the intended target. Soon after her mother's death, she was approached by a charlatan, a man claiming to be the head of a cult, a pastor with healing powers, Choi Tae-min, despite his only ever having worked in a soap factory, a small newspaper and as a soldier and policeman. He had no religious training whatever.
Choi claimed that the soul of Park's mother had visited him and told him she was not really dead. She had merely moved out of the way to let Park take her shoes and become effectively First Lady. That started an unholy alliance. Choi set up a number of phoney foundations which Park nominally chaired, thereby making himself a fortune and gaining huge influence. Choi's daughter became involved, Choi Soon-Sil. The influence peddling became so great that even her father tried to stop it, without effect.
By 1998, with her father and the cult leader both dead, Park won election to parliament. By now she was deeply under the influence of Soon-sil. This grew exponentially when Park became President. Even before then, the USA was clearly worried as evidenced in a wikileaks cable from the US Ambassador in 2007 -
Once Park was in power, Choi continued her father's ways, peddling influence and extorting many tens of millions from companies. Worse, Choi was effectively controlling Presidential policy. Every day she received a huge stack of policy briefs which would then be discussed within her own inner circle, one that included a gigolo (!) and the video director said of a K-Pop group. Many of the papers were highly confidential, many dealing with relations with North Korea."Rumors are rife that the late pastor had complete control over Park's body and soul during her formative years and that his children accumulated enormous wealth as a result
For years Park's aides complained that the drafts they had made of speeches she was to give came back more or less as gibberish - Choi having polished them up!
Using her influence, Choi got her daughter into the most prestigious Woman's University despite her very poor grades. This caused a mini scandal which grew over time. To escape the heat, Choi and her daughter scuppered off to Germany - inexplicably leaving behind in her office the Galaxy pad containing masses of Presidential material, none of it encrypted. This was discovered by a cable TV network a week ago, whereafter the shit hit the fan in a very big way. The following day, Park made one of those grovelling apologies so common in Korea and Japan followed by a deep bow. But it was too late. The public was simply incredulous!
That a President would line her own pockets is one thing. That a President would be so under the influence of the daughter of a charlatan who claimed to speak to her long dead mother and at the same time stand by as she and her father became very rich, to say nothing of permitting Choi access to state papers is entirely another - and one Koreans find repugnant.
Today's newspapers claim Choi has returned to South Korea to face charges. To try to weather the storm, Park has also fired a number of her closet aides. But it's unlikely to work. Either she will be impeached, or more likely the opposition will let her historically low opinion ratings fall further and thereby ensure their candidate wins at the next Presidential election.
If South Korea was well away from North Korea's nukes, perhaps matters would not be so utterly disturbing and disgraceful. But Seoul is just down the road from Pyongyang. And this is yet another example of democracy in Asia ending up with top elected officials who are both corrupt and quite possibly destabilizing to not just the rest if Asia but also the world.
And we all thought Duterte in the Philippines was about as bad as you can get!
Reply With Quote
