Korea in Ongoing Uproar Over Book on Samsung
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Samsung is the most sacrosanct — and yet often mistrusted — company in South Korea.
Thus it’s hardly surprising that life has been a roller coaster for Kim Yong-chul since he began talking about Samsung Electronics two and a half years ago.
Samsung is the most sacrosanct — and yet often mistrusted — company in South Korea.
Samsung is the most sacrosanct — and yet often mistrusted — company in South Korea.
Thus it’s hardly surprising that life has been a roller coaster for Kim Yong-chul since he began talking about Samsung Electronics two and a half years ago.
Samsung is the most sacrosanct — and yet often mistrusted — company in South Korea.
Thus it’s hardly surprising that life has been a roller coaster for Kim Yong-chul since he began talking about Samsung Electronics two and a half years ago.
He has been celebrated by some as a whistle-blower, but in a culture that emphasizes workers’ loyalty to their employers, he has also been vilified as a traitor driven by personal grudges.
And that was before Mr. Kim’s 474-page exposé, “Think Samsung,” hit stores in February. [br]
The book makes sensational allegations of extensive corruption by Lee Kun-hee,
the richest man in South Korea and the chairman of Samsung Electronics,
the world’s largest technology company by revenue.
Since the book’s release, the country’s major newspapers and Web sites have refused to carry advertisements for it, and few South Korean publications have reviewed it, according to this article in the New York Times.
One newspaper reported on its popularity — it became a best seller, thanks to strong word of mouth on blogs and Twitter — but did not print its title or detail its allegations.
“Isn’t this a comedy?” Mr. Kim, 52, said in an interview. “I am challenging them to slap my face, to file a libel suit against me, but they don’t.
“They treat me like a nut case, an invisible man, although I am shouting about the biggest crime in the history of the nation.”
The book has sold 120,000 copies so far — an unusually good performance in South Korea for a nonfiction work.
Mr. Kim joined the company in 1997 after making his name as a star prosecutor who investigated the corruption of Chun Doo-hwan, the former military strongman. [br]
He became Samsung’s top legal counsel before quitting in 2004. He went public with his allegations of wrongdoing three years later.
Even for South Koreans accustomed to corruption scandals, his assertions were staggering.
Mr. Kim accused Mr. Lee and his loyal aides of having stolen as much as 10 trillion won, or $9 billion, from Samsung subsidiaries and stashed it in stock and bank accounts illegally opened in the names of executives.
Samsung executives have dismissed the book as “fiction.”
“We are seething with anger, but we are not going to sue him and make him a star again,” said Kim Jun-shik, Samsung’s senior vice president for corporate communications.
“When you see a pile of excrement, you avoid it not because you fear it but because it’s dirty.”
Mr. Lee was charged with tax evasion and breach of trust in April 2008 and convicted on both charges in what became known as the Samsung slush fund scandal.
But he avoided prison and eventually received a presidential pardon and returned to the chairmanship of Samsung.
Though the legal case is over, the country is still grappling with the questions that it raised — and that Kim Yong-chul’s book continues to raise — about Samsung, its place in society and the independence of the country’s news media and justice system.
Under Mr. Lee’s direction, Samsung grew into a conglomerate that generates more than a fifth of South Korea’s exports.
It employs 270,000 people around the world and has become synonymous with success, style and pride in South Korea.
The book alleges that they shredded books, fabricated evidence and bribed politicians, bureaucrats, prosecutors, judges and journalists, mainly to ensure that they would not stand in the way of Mr. Lee’s illegal transfer of corporate control to his only son, Lee Jae-yong, 41.
In his book, Mr. Kim depicts Mr. Lee and “vassal” executives at Samsung as bribing thieves who “lord over” the country, its government and media.
He portrays prosecutors as opportunists who are ruthless to those they regard as “dead” powers, like a former president,
but subservient to and afraid of Samsung, which he calls the “power that never dies.”
“I wanted to leave a record of Samsung’s corruption because prosecutors’ investigation turned it into historical gossip,” Mr. Kim said.
“I wrote this book because I was afraid that children would grow up believing that in South Korea, justice does not win, but those who win become justice.”
