S.Korea's Roh reaches out to Western investors

S.Korea's Roh reaches out to Western investors

Paul Eckert, Reuters, Seoul

South Korean President-elect Roh Moo-hyun, once a fiery union
lawyer, reached out to foreign investors on Friday, vowing
further steps to open a fast-growing economy that has a history
of hostility towards outsiders.

Roh also said, in a speech to the American and European
chambers of commerce in Seoul, he was confident the North Korean
nuclear crisis would be resolved peacefully.

The 56-year-old former dissident lawyer's breakfast with
hundreds of Western executives was the latest step in his shift
to the pragmatic center, after election campaign rhetoric about
less reliance on the United States that rattled both Washington
and the South Korean establishment.

"It is my belief that companies that operate here with foreign
capital investment are not foreign companies but Korean
companies, in that they provide jobs, create economic value and
pay Korean taxes," Roh said.

U.S. and EU investors accounted for 60 percent of foreign
investment in the country, he said.

"You and the Korean people today are in the same boat named
'Korea' and are sailing to a common destiny. I will try to be a
good captain of the ship," joked the one-time maritime minister.

With war jitters and the government moving to rein in
galloping consumer debt, analysts say prospects for the South
Korean economy are uncertain. The government sees economic growth
of around five percent in 2003 versus around six last year.

The corporate charm offensive followed a visit by Roh on
Wednesday to the main U.S. Army base in Seoul, where he saluted
troops in an effort to dispel fears that his election last month
was a vote to expel American soldiers deployed to protect a
country still technically at war with the communist North.

Anti-American protests surged last month after a grisly road
crash in which two girls were crushed by a U.S. Army vehicle.

Roh, who takes office on Feb. 25, "comes into office with less
international experience than the president of any major country
I can think of", said a U.S. diplomat in Seoul.

The self-educated lawyer, who once boasted he'd never been to
the United States, said he would visit Washington as soon as
possible after taking office.

Roh told the executives he was aware of their complaints about
problems with Korean corporate governance, regulatory
transparency and labor market flexibility. He said his years as a
strike lawyer would help him reduce labor strife.

"I don't think of myself as a fighter. I'm more of a
mediator," he said of his firebrand image from the 1980s when he
tackled corporations and Seoul's then military rulers in court.

Roh said xenophobia toward foreign business, for which South
Korean workers are infamous, was mostly a thing of the past.

"The mindset of Korean labor has changed," he said. "Workers
used to see foreign companies as extorting money from Korean
labor; now they see the firms as creating jobs."

Roh was tentative about the timing of plans to privatize
state-held banks and energy firms.

"We will privatize the corporations when the market is able to
absorb that change," he said in response to a question.

One U.S. executive grumbled that South Korean labor policies
are far more cumbersome than Roh described.

"South Korean workers, the government and the media react
allergically to foreign attempts to buy, say, local banks," said
the executive, who declined to be identified.

But Jeffrey Jones, a past-president of the American Chamber of
Commerce in Seoul, said Roh's vision was good for investors.

"During the election process, he said things that were
troubling to the conservative community as well as to the foreign
community. But I think we see today that electioneering and the
reality of being the president of an important country are two
different things," Jones told Reuters.