 |
A scandal is swirling round the
South Korean president. Park Gun-hye has been accused by prosecutors of
being complicit in a scheme to pressure big companies to donate millions
of dollars to funds controlled by a very close friend.
Some
of the biggest family-run firms - Samsung, Lotte, SK - have been
raided, along with various government offices. Ms Park's lawyer says
prosecutors have "built a house of fantasy" but the allegations
highlight a historical paradox, say the BBC's Stephen Evans in Seoul.
 |
| Roh Moo-hyun took his own life six months after leaving the presidency |
 |
| Demonstrators have demanded President Park's resignation |
Lee Myung-bak (2008-13) apologised after his elder brother was sentenced to two years in prison for accepting $500,000 from businessmen in return for influence over the government.
And now the current president, Park Gun-hye, is accused by prosecutors of being complicit in a scheme to pressure millions of dollars out of big companies.
There does seem to be a pattern: even if the president seems untouched, those close to him - or now her - harvest opportunities for reaping cash from their closeness to power. It's sometimes called "pay to play".
And all in a country where you can leave a full wallet on a table to reserve a place in a bar in the full confidence that it will not be stolen. You can forget your camera in a public place and return unworried to find it in the same spot or even moved to the side and left safely under a shelter.
- South Korean authorities raid Samsung in Park Geun-hye probe
- South Korea's presidential scandal
- Park Geun-hye and the friendship behind S Korea's presidential crisis
- South Korea profile
Sometimes politics and business go hand-in-dirty-hand together: a chaebol head goes to jail and then the president pardons him. Why is this? How do you explain an almost naive honesty at the bottom and an unreliable moral compass at the top?
Firstly, honesty is not such a simple quality. We can be honest in some circumstances and not in others. Even though there is a high level of trust between people in South Korea, other measures of honesty paint a less idyllic view.
Researchers at the University of East Anglia in the UK devised an experiment to test personal honesty in 15 countries. They got people from each country to toss a coin privately and then report the result.
The participants were told they would get more money if heads came up than tails (even though the actual probability was 50:50). The more the people involved reported that they had had more than 50% of heads, the more dishonest they were deemed to be.
South Korea came out low (though not quite as dishonest as China, but way below the UK, the most honest country on the basis of this particular test).
Away from the test and back in the real world, dishonesty at the top (in business and politics) is not unknown. One of the reasons is the way South Korea is run, with the government historically taking a strong role in the direction of the economy.
The government of Park Chung-hee (the current president's dictatorial father) started the modernisation of South Korea by directing chaebol heads to establish industries.
As Professor Robert Kelly of Pusan National University put it: "The opportunities for graft (political corruption) are as obvious as they are extensive. These are the sorts of relationships that have repeatedly done-in Korean political and chaebol elites. Until the state steps back from the economy, such scandals will continue."
There are also deeper roots, according to Professor Kyung Moon Hwang of the University of Southern California. Confucianism "values not only hierarchy in social relations but also reciprocity, the idea that one must repay kind treatment".