Independent presidential candidate Ahn Cheol-soo suffered a further setback to his upright and clean image Friday, as fresh allegations surfaced about an illicit manipulation of his apartment sale price and his plagiarism of a research paper.
Local media outlets reported Ahn signed a contract in 2000 that said he sold an apartment in southern Seoul for 70 million won ($62,780), when the actual price was more than 200 million won.
The apartment, which was bought in 1988, has been a source of controversy recently because it was purchased when Ahn was still a graduate student without the income to afford such a property.
The allegations closely follow an apology by the 50-year-old former professor of Seoul National University (SNU) for his wife under-reporting the price of an apartment she bought in 2001, effectively allowing her to save around 10 million won in acquisition and registration taxes. The apartment Kim said she bought for 250 million won was sold last year for 1.1 billion won.
A large number of candidates to key government posts have so far quit during parliamentary confirmation hearing after being beleaguered by allegations of manipulation of home sale prices.
"Ahn will be ready to assume responsibility for suspicions surrounding the apartment sale contract manipulation," Ahn's spokeswoman Lee Sook-hyun said in a radio interview.
Other aides to the presidential hopeful said even if there was under-reporting on the sales price of the small home, it did not amount to criminal fraud as Ahn was not obligated to pay capital gains tax on the transaction anyway.
Under Korean law, a person who owns just one home that is not classified as a luxury residence need not pay transfer taxes.
In addition to the real estate transaction allegations, a cable TV station claimed a thesis published in the June 1993 issue of the Seoul Journal of Medicine, with Ahn as the second author, may have been plagiarized from a master degree paper released in 1988.
"With the exception of some minor details, attribution notes and the fact that the second paper was translated into English, the two are identical,' the media company said.
The same paper was one of five Ahn submitted to SNU when he applied for his position at the university last year.
Related to this claim, Ahn's spokesman Yoo Min-young said the first author of the 1988 paper had asked for Ahn's assistance with some parts of the work and the translation of the thesis into English. He said because of this contribution, Ahn was listed as a second author and that such a practice was "natural" in academia. Yoo added he saw no reason to make an issue out of this.
Sources at the National Research Foundation of Korea confirmed that, by the standards of the time, Ahn's actions could not be seen as irregular, although this may not be the case under present circumstances.
Despite such justifications, the presidential contender will likely be hurt by the two under-reporting cases and the plagiarism controversy as they conflict with what he has said in the past.
In a book published earlier in the year, Ahn said tax evaders should be harshly punished as a warning to the public. He also said that even if no law is broken, a person skirting his or her social obligations can be viewed as being corrupt in a broader sense.
In an interview made in 2008, Ahn also lamented on the country's lenient standards on plagiarism that have spread to the point where students do not feel guilty about copying the works of others. (Yonhap)