By Na Jeong-ju
The ruling Saenuri Party’s ethics committee on Tuesday rejected a petition from one of two party members embroiled in an escalating money-for-candidacy scandal to reconsider a prior decision to oust them from the party.
The committee agreed last week to expel the two members — Rep. Hyun Young-hee and former lawmaker Hyun Ki-hwan — for doing “extreme harm” to the party through their connection to the scandal.
Hyun Ki-hwan is suspected of having taken 300 million won ahead of April’s parliamentary elections from Rep. Hyun in return for helping her gain a proportional representative seat. At the time, the former lawmaker was serving as a member of a party committee responsible for choosing candidates for lawmakers.
He filed a petition with the ethics committee to reconsider last week’s decision, but this was rejected, the party said. The party’s Supreme Council is expected to approve their expulsion at a meeting scheduled for Thursday.
The rejection came a day after the prosecution arrested Cho Ki-moon, a former Saenuri member based in Busan, for delivering the money from Hyun Young-hee to Hyun Ki-hwan.
Cho, an aide to Hyun Ki-hwan, allegedly used a phone registered under the name of another party member to communicate with the two Hyuns. Both have the same last name, but are not relatives.
The prosecution said the 300 million won included bundles of U.S. dollars and euro notes, suggesting that the money might have come from Hyun’s husband, Lim Soo-bok, who runs a Busan-based steel firm, Kang Lim CSP.
The prosecution found that the firm changed a large sum of Korean won into euros and dollars in March just days before the money was given to Hyun Ki-hwan.
Last year, Kang Lim CSP was slapped with hundreds of millions of won in fines for evading taxes. Prosecutors suspect that Lim, chairman and CEO of the firm, might have created a slush fund to finance his wife’s bid for a seat in the National Assembly.
Saenuri is struggling to minimize the impact of the scandal as the party prepares for the Dec. 19 presidential election. Its top presidential hopeful Rep. Park Geun-hye was interim head of the party during the April elections.