SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s top prosecutor resigned Friday following a wave of scandals and public infighting in his office. The resignation of Prosecutor General Han Sang-dae was quickly accepted by President Lee Myung-bak, who urged the nation’s prosecutors to undertake “self-reflection” and “reform to restore the trust of the people.”
For weeks, the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office has been embarrassed by a series of scandals. Early in November, a senior prosecutor named Kim Kwang-joon was arrested on charges of accepting $ 826,000 in bribes from a conglomerate and from the alleged mastermind behind a Ponzi scheme. Days later, it was revealed that a junior prosecutor had had sex in his office with a female suspect he had been questioning on theft charges.
Amid the uproar over those incidents, another prosecutor issued a public call for thorough reform in the agency — but, in a text message meant for a friend that became public after he mistakenly sent it to a reporter, wrote that he was merely paying lip service to the idea in hopes of appeasing the public and the news media.
A survey released this week by a government anticorruption panel found that South Korea’s law enforcement authorities — prosecutors, the police and the Justice Ministry — were viewed as the most corrupt arms of the government.
“I bow before the people in apology because the prosecution caused a great shock and disappointment,” Mr. Han said on Friday.
Prosecutors in South Korea have long been accused of wielding outsized influence. They supervise police investigations and have exclusive power to decide who is indicted (South Korea has no grand jury system). The office’s elite Central Investigation Unit, which investigates high-profile corruption cases among tycoons, politicians and relatives of high-ranking officials, is both feared by politicians and derided by civic groups that say it essentially serves the interests of the political establishment, by pursuing some targets and ignoring others. Critics cite this unusual dynamic between prosecutors and politicians to explain why repeated attempts — most recently by President Lee’s predecessor, the late Roh Moo-hyun — to curtail prosecutors’ influence have all failed.
But pressure on the office has been escalating. The National Police Agency has demanded more freedom to conduct investigations independent of prosecutors’ supervision. All of the major candidates in the Dec. 19 presidential election have promised to rein in their power. The main opposition candidate, Moon Jae-in, has pledged to establish a new, separate agency to investigate corruption within the government, and some lawmakers in the governing party support the idea.
Mr. Han had been working on a reform package said to include many of the opposition’s demands, including the elimination of the Central Investigation Unit and the introduction of a grand jury system — until he faced a public revolt from his subordinates. Choi Jae-kyong, head of the Central Investigation Unit, publicly clashed with Mr. Han over whether the unit should be scrapped.
Mr. Han then ordered an internal investigation of Mr. Choi. It emerged that Mr. Choi had sent text messages to Mr. Kim, the prosecutor accused of taking bribes, advising him on how to stonewall news media inquiries. “Say ‘I did nothing against the law. That’s not true,’” one text message read. “Then stop there and give them no details.”
By this week, the spat between Mr. Han and Mr. Choi appeared to have expanded into a full-blown staff rebellion. Senior prosecutors confronted Mr. Han as a group, asking him to resign to take responsibility for the recent scandals. Mr. Han reportedly insisted that he would resign only after seeing his reforms through.
But on Friday, Mr. Han said he was leaving the question of reforms to his successor, who was not named immediately. Mr. Choi indicted that he, too, would resign from his post.
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