South Korea scandal may have begun with Macau card game

The Washington Post has published an article claiming that the ongoing corruption scandal involving South Korean president Park Geun-hye began with the arrest of the chief executive of a South Korean cosmetics company, who was caught gambling in Macau in November last year.
Gambling is illegal for nationals of South Korea – even abroad – and is punishable with prison time.
Chung Woon-ho, the chief executive of South Korean company Nature Republic, was ultimately found guilty of gambling and sentenced to a year in prison. However, that was not before the executive entered into a legal dispute with his own attorney, during which another serious act of corruption within the country was uncovered.
The revelation, according to the Washington Post, set in motion a series of investigations disclosing just how widespread these “typically South Korea act[s] of corruption” really are.
In time, the investigations, spearheaded by reports from South Korean daily Chosun Ilbo, closed in on the country’s president. They included a senior secretary to Park Geun-hye, An Chong-bum, who had allegedly been coercing conglomerates to donate money to the newly-established MI-R Foundation.
Left-leaning newspaper Hankyoreh later uncovered the final piece of the puzzle: the link between the MI-R Foundation and Choi Soon-sil – now the center of the scandal – who is the daughter of cult leader Choi Tae-min and the foundation’s alleged de-facto owner.
“Park Geun-hye and Choi Tae-min’s strange relationship was an open secret in South Korea but had never been investigated,” notes the Washington Post report.
It concludes that a seemingly insignificant card game at a table in Macau has blossomed into South Korea’s most extensive and damaging political scandal since the country’s democratization in 1987. DB