Police look into allegations against LH employees of speculative land buying

The LH office in Jinju, South Gyeongsang Province / Yonhap

Police began investigating allegations raised by activists that employees at a state housing cooperation bought plots of land in two cities in Gyeonggi Province before the government announced a massive development plan there.

The anti-corruption unit of Gyeonggi Nambu Police Agency said Wednesday it received a complaint on the allegations and started to look into them.

On Tuesday, the People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy and Minbyun, an association of progressive lawyers, accused 14 employees at the Korea Land and Housing Corp. (LH) of speculative land buying in Gwangmyeong and Siheung.

Later that day, the land ministry said it suspended 12 people from their duties, effective immediately. The remaining two were former employees, the ministry said. After the ministry's initial probe, the number of incumbent officials suspected of being involved in the case rose to 13 as of Wednesday afternoon.

Last month, the land ministry selected a vast area spanning 12.71 million square meters in the two cities as the site for approximately 70,000 new homes in order to meet housing demand in the capital area and cool down runaway housing prices.

The two satellite cities are located about 12 kilometers southeast of Yeouido, a major business district in southwestern Seoul.

According to the two groups' allegations, the LH employees who are working in the capital area and their family members bought plots of farmland totaling 23,028 square meters for about 10 billion won (US$8.88 million) from April 2018 to June 2020, possibly using internal, classified information.

Of the money, around 5.8 billion won is believed to be loans from a particular financial institution, the groups said.

They also alleged that those employees worked on the land compensation team and must have knowledge of how to get heavily compensated when the government seeks to acquire land to build apartments there.

The ministry said it will expand its probe to see if more officials at the ministry and the LH are engaged in suspicious land transactions, and refer the case to police if any illegal activity is detected. (Yonhap)