The Sewol ferry disaster has led to calls for civil service reforms that targeted, among other things, revolving-door employment. As a result, retired government employees find it much harder to land jobs in the private sector.

The problem is that people of another breed ― those who have connections to the president ― are filling the posts, many of which used to be taken by retired bureaucrats.

This is more palpable in the finance sector, with the president and her aides regarding it as spoils of their election victory. They are more tempted to do so because executive positions in the financial sector provide generous compensation.

This reminds many of the reign of the so-called “Four Financial Kings,” who occupied the top posts of the four major financial groups during the Lee Myung-bak administration. All four had close personal ties with Lee, three being his fellow alumni of Korea University. The university’s graduates had a heyday during the Lee government.

Sadly, the Park Geun-hye administration is following this bad tradition. This time, the people parachuting into the lucrative executive positions at financial firms are graduates of Sogang University, the president’s alma mater.

This may not surprise us further, having already witnessed, among other things, Park’s appointment of her college laboratory partner as head of the defense acquisition agency, which had been battered by a series of corruption scandals.

Yet, the controversy surrounding the selection of the new CEO of Woori Bank should sound an alarm over Sogang graduates’ onslaughts in top executive positions.

According to news reports, the incumbent CEO Lee Soon-woo, who had been favored for a second term, gave up his bid under pressure from the government, which has a 57 percent stake.

Lee’s abrupt withdrawal has bolstered the widely circulated rumors that the Blue House wants to install a Sogang graduate ― executive vice president Lee Kwang-goo, who made the short list of three candidates.

Lee Kwang-goo is a member of a group of Sogang graduates active in the financial sector ― named “Sogeumhoi,” meaning Sogang financiers’ club.

The club ― founded in 2007 after Park lost the presidential primary race to Lee Myung-bak ― is gaining considerable clout in the finance sector, having sent many of its members to key posts. They include Daewoo Securities CEO Hong Sung-kook, Export-Import Bank of Korea president Lee Duk-hoon and Koscom CEO Chung Yun-dae.

Hong Kyttack, chairman and CEO of the Korea Development Bank Financial Group, is also a Sogang graduate, which critics said affected his choice of Hong Sung-kook, a fellow alumnus, as the new CEO of Daewoo Securities, which is under his group.

There is one more case of members of the Sogang clique banding together in the same firm ― Kong Myung-jae, a Sogang graduate who participated in Park’s campaign team as a professor, has been named auditor at Eximbank, which is headed by another Sogang graduate.

Few would believe that all these members of the Sogang fleet took their posts only based on their capabilities. This is more the result of the government still considering the financial sector as part of election spoils at their discretion.

What is more outrageous is that our chief executive is offering jobs that go with fat paychecks to her cronies, at a time when the nation’s financial sector is bracing for more painful downsizing after shedding about 5,000 jobs during the past year.