By Kim Rahn
Prosecutors plan to seek an arrest warrant for Korean Air’s former executive vice president Heather Cho today, they said Tuesday.
She will face charges of forcing the change of an aircraft’s course and committing violence that disturbed flight safety.
Cho has been under investigation after she ordered a plane bound for Incheon from New York to return to the gate from a taxiing area at JFK International Airport on Dec. 5 so that a chief flight attendant could get off. Cho was angry because a junior attendant served her a packet of macadamia nuts without removing them from the bag and presenting them on a plate.
Prosecutors said that Cho denied some of violence allegations during earlier questioning on Dec. 17, but they decided to apply the charges based on testimony from witnesses and mobile messenger records of a passenger who was in the first-class cabin with Cho.
“The chief flight attendant, who has judicial police power, was removed from an operating flight by violence and private authority. It infringed on the attendant’s personal interest and caused legal disorder on the flight,” a prosecutor at the Seoul West Prosecutors’ Office said.
“By Cho’s behavior, the flight, which was moving according to the control tower’s instructions, changed its course. It threatened safety at the airport.”
The prosecution also plans to seek a warrant for a Korean Air executive, Yeo, who allegedly ordered flight attendants on the plane to delete email about the incident after the scandal emerged, and to lie to investigators.
But prosecutors said they have not found solid evidence of Cho ordering the evidence fabrication.
A local court will decide on whether to issue the warrants next week.
In the meantime, Cho’s younger sister and Senior Vice President, Emily Cho, has controversially blamed all Korean Air workers for problems at the company.
According to the carrier and workers there, the younger Cho sent an email to marketing employees on the evening of Dec. 17 when her elder sister was being investigated.
In the email titled “Letter of Apology,” she wrote, “Corporate culture and the problems in a company are not created by one person.” She said all staff were to blame, adding, “I’m reflecting on myself.”
Staff suspect that she wrote the letter because critics had focused on the authoritative and exclusive corporate culture at the airline, which the Cho family controls.
Emily Cho, or Cho Hyun-min, 31, is in charge of advertising, marketing and communications at Korean Air and marketing at the company’s low-cost affiliate, Jin Air. She is also vice president at Jungseok Enterprise, a Korean Air sister company.
The second daughter of Korean Air Chairman Cho Yang-ho is the youngest executives at the nation’s major conglomerates.
Referring to her marketing position, she said, “Everybody knows that I lack many things. And I have nothing to say if somebody asks me whether I’m entitled.”
But she added, “I’m doing my best. And there is a reason for my taking charge of marketing.”
She said on a TV program earlier this year that she became an executive when she was 29, and freely admitted she was appointed by orders from the top.
As for her email, Korean Air staff and some in the public say the Cho family still did not understand what all the fuss was about.
“I don’t care what position you take because you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth. But you treat workers as slaves, and why is it the slaves’ fault?” a worker wrote on the company’s intranet.
Culture critic Chin Jung-kwon said on Twitter, “Cho Hyun-min, now I know it (blaming others) is family history.”