Corruption up and down in Korea

The Korea Herald, Asia News Network, Seoul

While the nation's eyes and ears were directed to the investigation of the SK Group money funneled into the ruling and opposition political camps, media reports revealed more banal cases of corruption that occurred in the bureaucratic sector last week.

These stories took much less space in newspapers than the articles concerning the activities of Grand National Party Rep. Choi Don-woong and ex-presidential secretary Choi Do-sul, but they caused no less frustration in the public mind than the celebrated political scandals.

In the case of the construction affairs chief at a district office in southern Seoul, a manila envelop handed him by the owner of a firm of contractors after dinner at a Japanese-style restaurant contained 5 million won in cash.

Until he was caught "red-handed" Wednesday evening, an inspection team from the Prime Minister's Office had trailed him for five months following tips that he had frequent meetings with businessmen over construction projects awarded by his district administration.

A man who operates a catering business made his "confession" available to the press, claiming that he had spent over 100 million won entertaining the staff at two high schools in Seoul since 1997. In order to secure 10-year service contracts with these schools, he offered them lavish drinking parties at deluxe bars in Gangnam, which were extended to paid sojourns as guests in nearby hotels.

A third case involved a senior official at the Food and Drug Safety Administration who liberally distributed invitations to the wedding of his eldest son last month and allegedly collected hundreds of millions of won from guests, who happened to include many food and drug businessmen. A joint inspection team is known to have sent officials to the wedding to collect evidence of this traditional form of bribery.

For some time, people held the false belief that democratization would help uproot, or at least reduce, corruption because the bureaucracy would be released from the protection of authoritarian power and come under the scrutiny of the law enforcement authorities, civil society and the media. After a decade, they realized that it was not the case in this republic.

Initially, high-level collusion between political power and big business appeared to be diminishing, but close associates and family members of the president were easily trapped by the temptation of money.

And then the traditionally costly political system, which required huge amounts of funds to maintain vast party organizations and manage election campaigns at various levels, justified politicians putting their hands on dirty money. Things have gone back to square one as the SK scandal so clearly testifies.

Aware of corruption in high places, who in the lower echelons of the administration will be so anxious as to be committed to bureaucratic integrity? They know the new government's creation of an anti-corruption agency and the updating of the code of conduct for public services, inserting harsh but infeasible austerity clauses, are only political gestures.

Democracy can offer a more fertile ground for corruption because it provides a regular change of power which, if accompanied by a weak leadership, loosens moral as well as systemic safeguards for clean government. This, unfortunately, seems to be true in this country where a competition in corruptibility is underway between the political and bureaucratic societies.