South Korea’s Clintonian Scandal

Evidence emerges that the President’s consigliere solicited corporate donations to nonprofit foundations in return for influence and used access to sensitive government information to help make policy. Prosecutors raid government and foundation offices looking for evidence of corruption.

This is not a prediction for the first 100 days of a Hillary Clinton administration. It’s a scandal that has seen South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s approval rating fall to 14%.

Ms. Park campaigned in 2012 as a reformer of Korea’s corporate-political power nexus. Yet once in office she failed to contain the power of the chaebol, the family-run conglomerates that dominate the economy, and she resurrected practices from the 1970s when her father, Park Chung-hee, was dictator. These included using the National Security Law to disband an opposition party and prosecuting critics for criminal defamation.

At the center of the current scandal is Choi Soon-sil, the leader of the Church of Eternal Life and a confidante of the President for four decades. Last year she set up the Mir and K-Sports Foundations to promote Korean culture overseas. Within months they raised $72 million from corporate donors, allegedly with the help of the Culture Ministry and the Federation of Korean Industries.

Critics say that the foundations were intended to fund Ms. Park’s retirement activities. Investigators are probing whether Ms. Choi used some of the funds to buy homes in Germany. Both women deny the accusations. Journalists have found advance copies of the President’s speeches on a computer once owned by Ms. Choi, as well as footage of her giving orders to presidential staff. This confirms public suspicions that she wields political power behind the scenes.

Simmering anger over chaebol abuses explains the public’s furious reaction to the scandal over the past month. Ms. Park criticized her predecessors for pardoning chaebol owners, but then she pardoned the chairman of the SK Group last year. Regulators also allowed Samsung to push through a merger consolidating the power of the founder’s grandson Lee Jae-yong that hurt minority shareholders. Ms. Park’s public apology and the resignation of her aides has failed to appease public anger. With 15 months left in her term, she has little to no support in the National Assembly.

South Korea needs strong leadership to reform its economy and maintain its competitiveness. It also must reckon with North Korea’s accelerating drive to put nuclear warheads on missiles capable of reaching the South, Japan and the U.S.

Koreans elected Ms. Park in part out of nostalgia for the high-growth years of the 1960s and 1970s, but she failed to make a clean break from the darker aspects of her father’s rule. The country will now have to pay a price for this ethically challenged inheritance.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/south-koreas-clintonian-scandal-1477955665