Beset by scandal, S. Korean leader ousts officials
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s embattled president moved to replace her prime minister and two other top officials this morning in a bid to restore public confidence in the wake of a political scandal involving her longtime friend.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye nominated Kim Byong-joon, 62, as prime minister to take over for Hwang Kyo-ahn. Yim Jong-yong, chairman of the nation’s Financial Services Commission, was tapped to replace Yoo Il-ho in the top finance role, presidential spokesman Jung Youn-kuk said at a televised briefing. Park Seung-joo, South Korea’s former minister of gender equality and family, was chosen to replace Park In-yong as safety minister.
The reshuffling came as prosecutors are investigating whether a friend of Park Geunhye’s used her ties with the president to pull government strings from the shadows and to push businesses to donate money to foundations she controlled.
Prosecutors are expected to seek an arrest warrant for the friend, Choi Soon-sil, later today. She has been jailed under emergency detention laws.
The Seoul central district prosecutors office has 48 hours from the time she was jailed Tuesday to seek a warrant to formally arrest Choi, who is 60.
“Choi has denied all of the charges against her, and we’re concerned that she may destroy evidence,” a prosecution official said, according to Yonhap.
Fears of evidence destruction and concerns that a suspect is a flight risk are among the justifications for emergency detention.
“She has fled overseas in the past, and she doesn’t have a permanent address in South Korea, making her a flight risk,” the official told reporters. “She is also in an extremely unstable psychological state, and it’s possible an unexpected event could occur if she is released.”
Park acknowledged last week that Choi had edited some of her speeches and provided public relations help. South Korean media speculate that Choi played a much larger role in government affairs.
Kim, the nominee for prime minister, was a former top policy adviser for the late liberal President Roh Moo-hyun. The nomination, which requires parliamentary approval, is seen as an effort by the conservative Park to reach out to liberals for bipartisan support after previously firing eight presidential aides.
Thousands of people rallied in Seoul over the weekend, demanding Park’s resignation.
Early Tuesday, a 45-year-old man drove an excavator from a town about 150 miles south of Seoul and into the prosecutors office where Choi is being held, destroying the door. He later told police he wanted to “help Choi Soon-sil die, as she said she committed a sin that deserves death,” the Yonhap news agency reported.
Park has already long been criticized for an aloof manner and for relying on only a few longtime confidantes. That she may have been outsourcing sensitive decisions to someone outside of government, and someone connected with a murky backstory, has incensed many.
Choi is the daughter of the late Choi Tae-min, a shaman-fortune teller who was close to Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, the military dictator who ruled South Korea during the 1960s and 1970s.
Choi has been friends with Park since Choi’s father, the leader of a religious cult that incorporated elements of Christianity and Buddhism, gained Park’s trust by reportedly convincing her that he could “deliver messages” from her late mother, who was assassinated in 1974. Choi Tae-min denied that in a 1990 media interview.
Park Chung-hee was assassinated by one of his bodyguards in 1979, and Choi Tae-min died in 1994, but the daughters’ friendship endured. In her only public statement on the scandal, Park last week said that Choi Soon-sil had helped her through “difficult times.”
Information for this article was contributed by Hyung-jin Kim of The Associated Press; by Kanga Kong and Jiyeun Lee of Bloomberg News; and by Anna Fifield of The Washington Post.