By Lee Kyung-min
Former President Park Geun-hye, now in jail after being found guilty of corruption, will be questioned over an allegation that she was involved in an abuse of power scandal by the upper levels of the judiciary.
The Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office said Wednesday its investigators had searched the foreign ministry and found evidence of Park's involvement.
In the scandal, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Yang Sung-tae sought to use politically sensitive trials as leverage to establish a de facto "Second Supreme Court." The top court's administrative body, the National Court Administration (NCA) was mobilized to achieve this goal.
Park allegedly ordered her chief of staff Kim Ki-choon to meet with top court officials under Yang to get them to delay or overturn an earlier verdict in a civil suit filed against a Japanese firm by a group of Koreans who were forced laborers during the 1910-45 Japanese occupation.
The top court has been _ for unclear reasons _ delaying further deliberation on the case, which the Japanese firm appealed after the top court sent the case back to an appellate court with a recommendation to rule in favor of the victims in 2012.
Prosecutors questioned Kim, Tuesday over whether he gave documents containing Park's instructions to foreign ministry officials and was briefed regularly about the developments thereafter. Prosecutors said Kim discussed Park's orders at a meeting in his office with Cha Han-seong, the NCA chief at the time and Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se in late 2013. Yun and his subordinates including first vice minister were questioned recently.
During the earlier search of the ministry, the investigators seized material drafted in September 2013 related to an allegation that Yang deliberately postponed making the ruling in return for the ministry's influence in granting judges more state-funded overseas study opportunities.
The following year, in June 2014, the top court sent a judge to New York as part of the foreign ministry's permanent mission to the United Nations, four years after the position had been scrapped abruptly in 2010.
