By Na Jeong-ju
The prosecution arrested the owner of the nation’s largest room salon (hostess bar) YTT, Wednesday, for arranging some 88,000 sexual liaisons between customers and hostesses.
The owner, surnamed Kim, is also facing separate charges of evading billions of won in taxes by manipulating accounting books. Several police officers are also under investigation for receiving bribes from Kim, prosecutors said.
Kim, nicknamed “room salon king,” has operated the bar that has some 180 rooms and employs 500 hostesses since July 2010. Investigators suspect about 200 liaisons per day took place there on average. The bar takes up three basement floors of a hotel in Nonhyeon-dong, southern Seoul, which also belongs to Kim.
The bar has been ordered to close temporarily for two months by the district office for engaging in prostitution. Separately, Ramada Seoul Hotel in Samseong-dong was also suspended for three months after a bar inside the hotel was found to have hired prostitutes.
Kim’s brother was also arrested for helping Kim earn illegal gains and evade taxes.
At YTT, customers drank with the hostesses, and if they wanted to have sex with the girls, they went up to the hotel rooms via a secret elevator.
Before opening YTT, Kim had operated another room salon between 2007 and 2009. At that time he paid tens of millions of won in bribes to police officers in the district, prosecutors said.
“We plan to summon the officers for questioning soon to investigate the bribery suspicions,” a prosecutor said. “We will bring charges against them and demand their dismissal if they are guilty of committing any wrongdoings.”
The prosecution is now considering expanding its probe to other room salons in southern Seoul. It’s commonly said that many of them bribe officers in return for their “protection,” otherwise known as, “looking the other way.”
It’s understood that Kim’s wife operated the hotel on behalf of Kim.
She recently filed a suit against the Gangnam District Tax Office to demand the cancellation of a 1.7 billion won tax bill imposed on her. She claimed was just an investor, not the real owner of the hotel.