SEOUL (AFP) — South Korean prosecutors said on Wednesday they have discovered hidden assets of the founder of the Daewoo group, which collapsed in 1999 in one of the world's largest corporate failures.
They said Kim Woo-Choong had used borrowed names to conceal shares in local firms, but declined to confirm a media report that the hidden assets were valued at 144 billion won (140 million dollars).
Prosecutors have tried to track Kim's hidden assets since he was convicted in 2005 of embezzlement and accounting fraud after returning from six years of exile overseas.
In November 2006 an appeal court upheld Kim's convictions and sentenced him to eight and a half years in prison. He was also ordered to forfeit 17.9 trillion won (now 17.13 billion dollars) and pay 10 million won in fines.
The following month the jail sentence was suspended on grounds of ill health. Kim, 71, was pardoned last December in a presidential amnesty.
"Prosecutors have discovered Kim's hidden assets including paintings and shares," Oh Se-In, spokesman for the Supreme Prosecutors Office, told AFP.
"We are taking legal steps to confiscate his assets. The exact value of his hidden assets is not known," he said.
The JoongAng Daily said the assets which have been seized total 144.6 billion won. Among them, it said, are paintings worth 780 million won which were seized from an art gallery run by Kim's wife.
Kim was found guilty of masterminding an accounting fraud involving 20 trillion won and obtaining 9.8 trillion won in illegal loans from banks, as well as smuggling funds overseas.
Daewoo had debts of 82 billion dollars when it went under in the wake of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. The government was forced to spend some 30 trillion won to rescue it.
Kim fled the country. As the corporate meltdown unfolded he was accused of ordering his executives to inflate the group's assets between 1997 and 1998 to obtain bank loans.
Before the financial crisis exposed its weaknesses, Daewoo was exporting goods worth 17.6 billion dollars a year -- 13.3 percent of South Korea's total exports -- and employed 250,000 people worldwide.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
