By Park Si-soo
Staff Reporter
The bar brawl three years ago stills haunts Kim Seung-youn, chairman of Hanwha Group, although it remains to be seen whether the unsavory saga has helped him soften his temper. Kim has since kept a low profile, making a limited number of public appearances.
On Thursday, three former senior police officers involved in the brawl had their day in court.
The Supreme Court upheld an appellate court's suspended jail term for the three former officers, including Choi Ki-moon, a former commissioner of the National Police Agency, ending a three-year litigation involving them.
Choi and the two others were indicted in 2007 for their attempts to cover up an assault case involving Kim that year. Their scheme was struck down by a journalist, who was tipped off about it by unidentified sources.
At the time of the scandal, Choi, who retired from public service in 2005, was a senior advisor of a construction unit of Hanwha. The other two were ascending the bureaucratic ladder.
But they encountered unexpected turbulence in March 2007, created by the chairman's son, Kim Dong-won, then a student at Yale University, and fueled by Kim himself.
The student was embroiled in an altercation, during which punches were exchanged, at an up-scale bar in Seoul with some of its employees. Days after, the employees were taken forcibly to an abandoned building site at night by the tycoon's hired hands, where the Hanwha chairmen assaulted them on the site with his fists as well as a stun baton and steel pipe.
As a police department in central Seoul moved to investigate the case, Choi, who has strong connections with incumbent senior police officers, encouraged the two officers to overlook and, if possible, cover up the retaliatory attack.
The scandal forced Hong Young-ki, then head of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, to offer to resign in order to take responsibility. The Hanwha chairman was charged with violent assault.
The three were sentenced to a jail terms ranging between 10 months and a year in the first ruling, but an appellate court suspended their imprisonment for two years, citing a suspended jail term imposed on the tycoon as a mitigating factor.