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Prosecutors Will Soon Summon Again; Review of Arrest Warrants of Lee Jae-hyun Held

Prosecutors Will Soon Summon Again; Review of Arrest Warrants of Lee Jae-hyun Held

Posted October. 30, 2003 22:45,   

한국어

The Supreme Prosecutor’s Office (Ahn Dae-hee, the senior prosecutor), currently investigating the “SK Slush Fund” scandal, will soon summon Rep. Lee Sang-soo again, who supervised the financial activities of the Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) during last year’s presidential campaign to probe many suspicions on the campaign funds on October 30.

If Rep. Lee obeys the summons, the prosecutors will scrutinize whether the MDP kept a second set of financial records and whether the MDP collected the campaign funds from Samsung, LG, Hyundai, and Lotte along with SK as Rep. Kim Kyung-jae of MDP suggested.

In particular, the prosecutors will probe on the suspicion that Rep. Lee received corporate support money of 300 million won from Samsung group under the name of the three executives of Samsung in a way similar to the method with which he received one billion won illegally from SK under the name of the 33 executives of SK.

The prosecutors said, “Currently, it is not decided whether to expand the scope of the investigation or not. If the concrete clues are secured or the credibility is shown, we’ll investigate thoroughly, but we can’t probe simple political debates,” with respect to the expansion of the campaign funds investigation to the five big companies.

On the same day, the senior prosecutor Ahn said, “Secretly or publicly, we’ve never summoned the financial officials of the five big companies until now.”

Meanwhile, the review of the legality of the detention of Lee Jae-hyun, the ex-director of the Grand National Party’s (GNP) financial bureau and for whom the prosecutors sought the arrest warrant for his violation of the Political Fund Act on October 29, was held in the Seoul district court in the morning of the same day, presided by Choi Wan-ju, a senior judge specializing in the arrest warrants.

Lee, in the review, said, “By the order of Rep. Choi Don-woong, I delivered 10 billion won from SK to the GNP headquarter in Youido-dong, Yeongdeungpo-gu in Seoul, and made reports to Rep. Kim Young-iel, the then-GNP secretary general several times. But I had no idea that it was the slush funds from SK.”