Park Dae-sung |
‘There Is No Other Minerva but Park Dae-sung’
By Park Si-soo
Staff Reporter
The prosecution Thursday indicted online commentator Park Dae-sung, better known as Minerva, on charges of spreading false information through online articles to destabilize the foreign exchange market.
Prosecutors said Park, 31, is Minerva and there is no other Minerva but the one indicted.
Among the more than hundreds of articles mainly posted on Daum's Agora site, the prosecution found fault with articles posted on July 30 and Dec. 29. Park claimed in the first that financial authorities would suspend the exchange of foreign currencies starting Aug. 1 due to depleting foreign exchange reserves.
On Dec. 29, he claimed the finance ministry issued an emergency statement banning major banks here from buying dollars to help stop the Korean currency's further fall against the greenback. The ministry officially denies both allegations.
``The prosecution claims the articles are completely untrue and Park intentionally wrote them to destabilize the currency market. But after Park was arrested, it was confirmed that the government indeed intervened in the currency market, meaning the articles conveyed correct information,'' Minerva's lawyer, Park Chan-jong, told The Korea Times. ``To prove Park's innocence, I will ask the court to question former Finance Minister Kang Man-soo and other top finance regulators, who surely know what's true.''
The government's denial of Park's allegations has been undermined thus far since financial officials and a lawmaker disclosed the government's veiled market intervention.
Right after Park's detention, a ranking financial official acknowledged the government's intervention in the currency market on Aug. 1. At the same time, Rep. Lee Seok-hyun of the opposition Democratic Party also said the Ministry of Strategy and Finance indeed pressured representatives from the nation's seven biggest banks not to buy dollars during a meeting on Dec. 26, 2008, quoting alleged participants.
Asked of recent allegation that Park is not the only Minerva, the lawyer stressed ``it's not the centerpiece of this case.''
Last week, a monthly magazine carried an interview with an individual identified only as ``K'' who claims Minerva is a shared ID among seven financial experts.
But the prosecution still sees Park as the only Minerva, claiming that all the IP addresses Park used on the Internet matched those of his home. The prosecution also rules out the possibility of the fabrication of the IP addresses.
The prosecution says that Park's writings have had a ``seriously negative impact'' on the financial market and contributed to lowering the nation's credit standing as they called into question the nation's capability to repay its international debt.
It said that between Dec. 29 and Dec. 30, the amount of dollar purchases surged because of Minerva's writings, claiming that Minerva's allegedly false information forced financial authorities to spend more than $2 billion to put brakes on the further fall of the local currency.
pss@koreatimes.co.kr
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