By Yi Whan-woo
The prosecution arrested a woman Tuesday on charges of getting her daughter admitted to a foreign school by using forged documents.
The Incheon District Prosecutors’ Office identified the mother by her surname, Kwon, and said that she was arrested for hiring a broker to issue a fake foreign passport and submitting it to the school in Seoul.
Kwon is the first to be arrested among some 60 suspects under investigation over the past two months regarding this issue.
Most are family members of entrepreneurs, politicians and government officials, including Prime Minister Kim Hwang-sik.
Kwon is the daughter-in-law of a wealthy businessman from Chungcheong Province. The prosecution claims that she gave 100 million won ($91,000) to a broker to issue a fake British passport to help her daughter enter a foreign school in Seoul.
The mother is also suspected of requesting the broker later to issue a forged Guatemalan passport when she had her daughter move to a British foreign school..
Kwon allegedly submitted the passport issued by the Central American country because she feared the school’s admissions officers would find out that her daughter’s British passport was not genuine, according to the prosecution.
“We arrested her because she was likely to destroy all the evidence,” an investigator said.
“We found out she called the admissions officers at the two schools and asked them to discard copies of her daughter’s passports and other application documents that contained information on the child’s citizenship.
“She is still denying the allegations and instead claims that it was her husband and the broker who came up with the scheme, but we’ll prove she’s lying,” he added.
She is one of three suspects in their 30s and 40s for whom the prosecution sought arrest warrants Monday. The other two, both of them housewives, are facing similar charges but the court rejected the request for the warrants, saying they were unlikely to flee or destroy evidence.
One of the two women is a mother of three and allegedly had a broker issue a Honduran passport for her youngest child to enter a foreign school in Seoul.
She was accompanied by her lawyer and sought leniency, according to the prosecution.