'Room salon king' faces arrest

By Kim Rahn

Prosecutors sought arrest warrants for the owner of the nation’s largest “room salon” (hostess bar) and two collaborators Friday for arranging some 88,000 sexual liaisons between customers and hostesses.

The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office said the owner of the room salon “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (YTT), surnamed Kim, will also face charges of evading billions of won in taxes.

Kim’s brother and a man who runs the establishment helped him make the illegal gains and evade taxes, it said.

They employed prostitutes at the bar which took up three basement floors of a hotel in Nonhyeon-dong, southern Seoul, for over a year since opening in July 2010. The hotel also belongs to them.

Based on the bar’s account books and testimony from male customers who bought sex there, prosecutors confirmed around 4,300 cases of prostitution. They suspect about 200 liaisons per day took place on average.

YTT had 180 rooms and around 500 hostesses, and Kim was called a “room salon king.” “According to testimony, customers drank with the hostesses in the basement bar and if they wanted to have sex with the girls, they went up to the hotel’s guestrooms via a secret elevator,” a prosecutor said.

Kim evaded billions of won in taxes and wrongfully recorded billions of won in the sales at the bar as belonging to the hotel. They also operated another bar at an annex of the hotel without a license.

It is also alleged that before opening YTT, they operated another room salon between August 2007 and April 2009 and provided tens of millions of won in bribes to police officers in the district in return for not closing them down.

YTT was also popular among foreign men. It was listed as “the bar which saw the largest amount of money paid via credit cards by foreigners” by the Korea Exchange Bank last year.

In July, prosecutors questioned about 500 customers who often used their credit cards at the bar. It is said the men first refused to answer the summons, but later obeyed after investigators said they would send written requests to their homes so that their family would be able to learn about the prostitution.

In the meantime, Kim’s wife, a nominal owner of the hotel, recently filed a suit against the Gangnam District Tax Office, to demand cancellation of a 1.7 billion won tax bill imposed on her.

She said the office levied additional tax saying some of the sales were not included. She claimed it assumed she was one of the owners of YTT, but she was only an investor.