Prosecutors have launched an investigation into allegations that thousands of government officials working in Sejong City have illegally resold their ownership rights in apartments in the city to earn undue gains.　Investigators have raided six large real estate agencies in the city and seized their transaction files and records. The probe was prompted by a request from the city government, which has confirmed the involvement of realtors in the alleged illegal property deals by public officials.　

Editorial May 15, 2016

Donald Trump, who has called one opponent “Lyin’ Ted” and another “Crooked Hillary,” has gotten away with more falsehoods and fabrications than any politician in memory. He’s at it again.The subject is his tax returns. First he said he’d release them, as every Republican and Democratic presidential and vice presidential nominee has done since 1980. Then this week he told the Associated Press he probably wouldn‘t, at least not before an Internal Revenue Service audit was complete (which may or ma

Viewpoints May 15, 2016

The contests to decide the nominees of America’s two main political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, for the presidential election are all but over. That leaves both parties facing the challenge of reuniting for the fall campaign -- a feat that will be much harder to pull off this year than it was in most other presidential election years.Though it is mathematically impossible for Bernie Sanders to win enough pledged delegates to capture the Democratic nomination, he is staying in the

Viewpoints May 15, 2016

The tension between Silicon Valley and the federal government over digital privacy has taken a bizarre twist: Twitter has reportedly barred the analytics firm Dataminr, which scans the Twitterverse for breaking news and trends, from selling its services to U.S. intelligence agencies. Twitter seems to have no good reason for standing in the way of national security -- beyond advancing its own public relations strategy.　While the details remain hazy, U.S. intelligence agencies and Dataminr are sai

Viewpoints May 15, 2016

The government has poured more than 3 trillion won ($2.5 billion) into the air quality control sector over the past decade. However, a revelation from the Board of Audit and Inspection indicated that the ministry had failed to identify the main pollutants causing air pollution and erroneously measured the amount of fine dust in the air.The fine dust that swept over the Seoul metropolitan area and some major cities over the past two months came mostly from China and Mongolia’s sand storms. But a

Editorial May 12, 2016

The antitrust regulator has just issued a kind of verbal warning to the nation’s eight major duty-free operators for cartel behavior, without handing down any fines.The duty-free shops were found to have engaged in price-fixing by setting irregular foreign exchange rates for 63 months from 2008 to 2012. The players are Shilla, Walkerhill, Dongwha, the Korea Tourism Organization and four Lotte affiliates.Given that the Fair Trade Commission looked into the case for about four years, it is not sat

Editorial May 12, 2016

One thing the Panama Papers have made very clear is that there is a large system for concealing and moving money into and out of Pakistan, and this system is used more by businesses and high net worth individuals than it is by public figures. Of the 259 Pakistani names revealed thus far in the second release of the data, only a fraction are political figures. The rest are all connected with business.Why do so many people in the world of business feel the need to maintain an offshore company? The

Viewpoints May 12, 2016

Is a vote for presidential frontrunner Rodrigo Duterte a protest vote? No question. As observers have noted, six years of failures and frustrations generated by the incumbent administration have made a large part of the electorate predisposed to a radical prospect: a tough-talking mayor from outside Imperial Manila who appears to have no patience for the usual political niceties, and has vowed to smash the fraying conventions and institutions of the old guard — from shuttering Congress should it

Viewpoints May 12, 2016

Critiquing Donald Trump’s policy pronouncements for being implausible feels a bit like belittling bathroom graffiti for its weak use of metaphor and inappropriate deployment of the conditional rather than the subjunctive. Sure, you may be technically correct, but you’ve failed to grapple with the essentials of the form. And neither the author nor his audience is likely to take your criticisms to heart.But what can we pundits do? The man is now the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republic

Viewpoints May 12, 2016

In March last year, the National Assembly passed a drastic bill aimed at rooting out corruption among public officials. The bill was considered so draconian that lawmakers delayed its implementation to September this year to give people enough time to prepare for it.The legislation, commonly called the Kim Young-ran Act, is basically intended to plug a big loophole in existing laws. Currently, it is difficult to punish public officials who have received large amounts of money from businessmen if

Editorial May 11, 2016

The government’s push to introduce a performance-based pay system at public institutions is facing growing resistance from trade unions.As part of its campaign to reform the public sector, the government has been pressuring 120 public institutions to introduce performance-based pay by the end of this year.   But progress has been slow. The Ministry of Strategy and Finance said Monday has said that only 53 institutions have adopted merit-based pay and promotion systems so far. 　Resistance to meri

Editorial May 11, 2016