Independent Counsel to Summon Samsung Chair Again

Special prosecutor Cho Jun-woong and his team investigating the Samsung slush fund scandal said on Thursday that the group’s chairman will be subpoenaed again as a suspect at 2 p.m. Friday.

Assistant special prosecutor Yoon Jeong-seok said in a press conference, “We haven’t finished our probe. And the Samsung chairman is called in again for unfinished investigation into bank accounts under borrowed names and the alleged slush fund creation, and for a record review.”

Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee was questioned for 11 hours last Friday by the special prosecutors about the formation of illegal funds and bank accounts under borrowed names, illegal management succession, and lobbying of politicians and bureaucrats.

The special counsel plans to look into allegations that Lee evaded tax for margin profits from running some 1,300 accounts under borrowed names and that 16.2 percent of Samsung Life Insurance shares owned by former and current Samsung executives are inherited assets from late Chairman Lee Byung-chul, his father.

Regarding the illegal managerial rights’ transfer attempts through the issuance of Everland’s convertible bonds (CB) under market prices, the special investigators will look into if the Samsung chairman was briefed by major executives from the group’s strategic planning office in advance, or even ordered them to do so.

In the meantime, the independent investigation team carried out search and seizure on Samsung Electronics in Samsung Group building on Taepyeongno, Jung-gu, for borrowed-name accounts and slush fund cases.

An investigation team official said, “In order to secure the company’s confidential documents, we ransacked Samsung headquarters’ storehouse and data center by dispatching three operatives about 10:30 this morning.”

It is said that the sudden move was to secure information on slush funds and bank accounts under borrowed names, and to see if money was actually transferred to those fake accounts and to identify any suspicious movement of money in and out of specific accounts.

The independent counsel had asked the Financial Supervisory Service to look into 700 accounts under borrowed names and now it is reviewing the results, analyzing the movements of money in and out of those accounts.

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