By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter

The corruption scandal that is rocking the National Tax Service (NTS) may end up exploding in the face of the Lee Myung-bak administration.

Lawmakers of the opposition Democratic Party are raising new allegations that Cheong Wa Dae pressured former NTS official Ahn Won-goo to resign in July and offered him the chief executive officer (CEO) position of a Doosan Group affiliate as compensation.

Ahn was arrested last week over charges of providing tax favors to businessmen who made purchases from the art gallery of his wife, Hong Hye-kyung.

The 49-year-old is a central figure in the bribery scandal surrounding former NTS Commissioner Han Sang-ryule, who is now the subject of a criminal investigation over suspicions of lobbying a top government official for a second term in office.

Prosecutors say that in December of 2007, Han allegedly forced Ahn, then the head of a metropolitan tax office, to pay 300 million won to a close aide of then-presidential candidate Lee Myung-bak, in order to help Han keep the job he secured just a month earlier. Han continued on as NTS commissioner until January and is now staying in the United States.

According to a transcript unveiled by the Democratic Party of a July telephone conversation between Ahn and Lim Sung-kyun, then the internal audit director of the NTS, Lim demanded that Ahn resign from his post and claimed that it was an order from a senior Cheong Wa Dae official.

Lim also told Ahn that should he agree to step down, it would be arranged for him to become the CEO of Samhwa Crown and Closure, a Doosan Group unit that manufactures metal and plastic bottle caps.

Lim added in the recording that it was a decision made by the ``government as a whole.''

When Ahn retorted that he had heard of no such arrangement from his own sources at Cheong Wa Dae, Lim continued to insist that the orders came from the top.

``(The arrangement is acknowledged) by the whole government including Cheong Wa Dae. We have heard that the highest officials at Cheong Wa Dae know about this,'' Lim says.

The recent revelations raise further questions over how deeply the presidential office is involved in the current scandal, as well as the possibilities of murky connections between the NTS and Samhwa.

The Democratic Party named lawmaker Song Yong-gil to head a taskforce to investigate the allegations.

In a National Assembly appearance, current NTS Commissioner Baek Yong-ho denied the allegations that Cheong Wa Dae was involved in the tax agency's personnel decisions and insisted that Ahn was just one of the eight NTS senior officials who resigned amid the agency's self-reform efforts.

According to Baek, Lim told him that suggesting the Samhwa CEO post to Ahn was ``just an idea'' and had nothing to do with the intentions of Cheong Wa Dae.

``I believed that Ahn made a verbal mistake while trying to finish his duties before the new commissioner arrived,'' Baek said.

thkim@koreatimes.co.kr