About a month ago, South Korea’s Constitutional Court began a historic trial on President Park Geun-hye to determine whether she deserves to be removed from office.

The court has so far held 10 hearings and called in 16 witnesses to find the truth behind the corruption and influence-peddling allegations that led to her parliamentary impeachment on Dec. 9.

While some of the witnesses, including Park’s detained friend at the center of the scandal, Choi Soon-sil, have vehemently defended the embattled president, others have given testimonies that seem to further implicate the president in wrongdoing.  


The trial has also provided a rare look into the bewildering workings of the presidential office as well as Park’s relationship with Choi, such as Park’s illicit use of a mobile phone under a borrowed name. 

The Korea Herald compiled key testimonies to reconstruct the nation’s biggest-ever political scandal.

Park Geun-hye

Park’s main defense strategy, while not attending the trial in person, appears to be to delay the court proceedings for as long as possible. 

Her attorneys have asked for a long list of witnesses and they are even threatening to boycott the trial altogether if their requests are not met. 

In their appeal for the need to bring in Ko Young-tae for questioning, they claimed that the president’s current predicament started from her friend Choi Soon-sil’s adulterous affair with the 40-year-old former fencing champion.

They said that Park was an innocent victim of their soured romance. 

“The scandal surfaced because Choi Soon-sil, Park’s ‘invisible’ friend of 40 years, started an affair with Ko Young-tae. Ko learned about Choi’s close relationship with Park and tried to exploit it for (his and Choi’s) own personal benefits. As he failed to do so, he maliciously distorted the truth,” Park’s lawyer Lee Joong-hwan said during the 10th hearing. 

Another of her legal representatives Seo Seok-gu made remarks that reveal how the president and her legal team perceive the current situation.  

“Candlelight vigils (against Park) do not reflect the public sentiment, given they were led by labor union groups,” he said. The lawyer added that majority rule can be dangerous when the information provided is based on inaccurate media reports, likening the beleaguered president to the Greek philosopher Socrates, who was sentenced to death, and Jesus carrying the cross.

Choi Soon-sil

Park’s friend at the center of the scandal, Choi Soon-sil once said that she had committed “a sin that deserves death.” But appearing at court for Park’s impeachment trial, she insisted that she and Park had been framed and that all the allegations were fabricated.

Taking the witness stand at the fifth hearing, which lasted for more than five hours, she said “I don’t know” more than 130 times, when asked questions that can potentially work against her and the president. She even said: “How can I know that? I don’t even remember what happened yesterday.” 

Choi categorically denied the allegations that she meddled in state affairs using her ties to the president and colluded with Park to force local businesses to donate money to the nonprofit foundations allegedly controlled by her. The two are among the charges listed in Park’s parliamentary impeachment motion. Choi, currently arrested, is standing a criminal trial of her own for the aforementioned charges. 

“President Park is not a person who would derive personal benefits or give personal favors to her family members or close friends. She has no one else around, so I just wanted to help her. It is regrettable that I was completely framed and caused trouble,” she said, shedding tears in front of the nine judges. “I really don’t deserve this.” 

“All the allegations are exaggerated. I became a monster. I am living, but it is like I am dead.”

An Chong-bum

Park’s former secretary for policy coordination, An Chong-bum testified of the president’s close involvement in fundraising for Choi’s foundations. 

“She ordered me to raise funds of such amounts from companies,” he said, explaining about the numbers written in his notebooks during the fifth hearing. The handwritten notes, accepted by judges as evidence, detail Park’s instructions to An to collect specific amounts of donations from local conglomerates for the Mir and K-Sports foundations alleged to be under Choi’s control.

Asked whether he received an order from Park in 2015 to lay the groundwork to pardon SK Chairman Chey Tae-won, who was serving a four-year jail term for embezzlement, and let the conglomerate know about it in advance, he said, “It seems like it.”

SK Group is suspected of proposing the release of Chairman Chey to the presidential office in return for its donations to Choi’s entities. The conglomerate gave a total of 11.1 billion won to the Mir and K-Sports in early 2015.
  
Jeong Ho-seong 

A former presidential secretary for private affairs, Jeong Ho-seong sought to defend Park during the trial, but in doing so, he admitted to Park’s leaking government documents to the civilian Choi and illegal use of a mobile phone under a borrowed name. 

“The president herself edited speeches. But she was very busy and got tired, so she asked me to seek opinions from Choi Son-sil and reflect them if needed,” he said, calling Choi an “invisible, non-existent” person who assisted Park behind the scenes. “The president and I trusted Choi, so I did not think it would be an issue to share presidential documents with her.”

“It is so heartbreaking that the media depicts and lampoons Park as a president who only enjoys relaxing in her residence, receiving beauty treatments and going on overseas trips,” he said during the seventh hearing.

His revelation that he and the president had used mobile phones registered under borrowed names for security reasons -- a crime here punishable by up to three years in jail and 100 million won in fines -- gave rise to heated controversy. 

Park used the illegal phone to contact her inner circle and he paid for her phone bills with his own money, the arrested Jeong said. 

“It’s a rather painful side of our politics, but there has long been controversy about wiretapping,” he said. “We didn’t use (phones) registered under our names because of the risk of our conversations being tapped.”

Lee Seung-cheol 

Lee Seung-cheol, vice chairman of the nation’s largest business lobby group Federation of Korean Industries, testified that he had been instructed by the presidential office to lie about the dubious fundraising campaign to make it look like a voluntary process.  

The FKI, which represents some 600 local businesses here, is suspected of assisting the president and Choi in their fundraising for the Mir and K-Sports foundations.

During a parliamentary inquiry into the scandal held in December, the FKI executive testified that the group had voluntarily helped the Mir and K-Sports foundations to launch and raise donations from its member companies.  

Appearing at Park’s trial, however, he withdrew his earlier remarks and said he had been forced by the presidential office to collect the donations from local firms. 

Lee said he was more afraid of going against the presidential office than the possible punishment of perjury. “But since then, I started to feel ashamed as a head of the FKI after being subjected to a wave of criticism and facing the dissolution of the FKI.” 

Cha Eun-taek 

TV commercial director Cha Eun-taek, who was once a close associate of Choi and is on trial for monopolizing lucrative state-led projects through his ties to Choi, spoke about the influence that the civilian Choi had exerted on state affairs. 

“Choi used four phones and when a certain phone rang, she told people to leave the room and answered ‘yes, yes,’” he said during the eighth hearing. “I have heard over Choi’s phone the voice, which I think was of President Park, two or three times.”

“I also saw Choi working on Cabinet meeting documents on her computer in the office several times,” he said. 

“I think Choi had a big influence over personnel appointments in the government and presidential office,” he said, adding that his uncle Kim Sang-ryul was appointed a presidential secretary and his former teacher Kim Jong-deok a culture minister.

Yoo Jin-ryong 

Former Culture and Sports Minister Yoo Jin-ryong said that the presidential office pressured his ministry to discriminate against cultural figures and organizations critical of President Park. A two-page list of blacklisted persons and organizations was sent down to the ministry for the first time in June 2014, he said. 

“The president promised to embrace people critical of her when she offered me the culture minister’s post, but she started to express irritation and anger at my advice (to embrace her critics) after the Sewol ferry disaster,” he said during the ninth hearing, referring to the 2014 disaster which claimed more than 300 lives and triggered criticism of the government’s botched rescue operation.

Then chief of presidential staff Kim Ki-choon was the mastermind behind the creation of the blacklist and systematic efforts to exclude those in the list from state support, the former minister claimed. 

Yoo also said that Park ordered him to fire two ministry officials who wrote an audit report unfavorable to Choi’s horseback-rider daughter Chung Yoo-ra. The officials had led the ministry’s special inspection of the organizer of an equestrian competition, after dressage player Chung failed to win the top spot in the race. 

Mo Chul-min, who served as presidential secretary for education and cultural affairs at that time, backed Yoo’s claims during the 10th hearing. 

“Yoo and I were surprised and embarrassed and we looked at each other when Park called the two officials by their names and said they were ‘bad people,’” said Mo, who is now South Korea’s ambassador to France. “It is rare for a president to mention names of working-level officials and order a personnel transfer.”

By Ock Hyun-ju (laeticia.ock@heraldcorp.com)