During the Moon Jae In administration, eleven people including Kim Soo Hyun, the former chief of policy of the presidential office, were indicted for allegedly manipulating national statistics like real estate. However, they collectively denied the charges in court.
At 10 AM on May 22, the 12th Criminal Division of the Daejeon District Court held a trial preparation session for eleven individuals. These include former Presidential Policy Chiefs Kim Soo Hyun and Kim Sang Jo; former Minister of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport Kim Hyun Mee; and Yoon Sung Won, former First Vice Minister of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport. They were indicted on charges of violating the Statistics Act and abusing their authority to obstruct the exercise of rights. In the trial held without the attendance of all defendants, the lawyers for the 11 defendants all expressed their opinion, denying the charges.
The defense argued for the necessity of separating the trial, stating that the charges in this case are categorized by different statistics, such as housing, employment, and income, with most related defendants not involved in overlapping charges.
The purpose is to minimize unnecessary procedures, as the list of evidence in this case alone is 1,000 pages and the case record reaches tens of thousands of pages only for some charges. The prosecution and the court also recognized the need, but whether to separate the trial by charge or proceed in parallel will be decided after examining the defendants’ specific opinions and adopting evidence on the charges.
The prosecution also presented additional evidence, including a presidential record not listed in the evidence before the trial. The material is a visual and auditory analysis, and without the court’s evidence adoption process, the defense finds it difficult to verify the specific content.
In response, the prosecution explained, “There is a risk of illegality if we disclose the details in the current situation. We ask for your understanding that we cannot apply the general evidence viewing procedure,” and “We will naturally be able to present it as the trial procedure progresses.”
The court scheduled the next session for August 14 to further organize the evidence, review the defendants’ opinions on the charges, and discuss the separation of trials and other procedures.
Meanwhile, Kim and others were brought to trial on charges of manipulating the weekly housing price fluctuation rate calculated by the Korea Real Estate Institute. They allegedly altered the data 125 times from 2018 to August 2021 to make housing prices appear stable, reflecting the impact of the real estate measures during the Moon Jae In government starting in June 2017.
The prosecution also noted in the indictment that at the time, officials from the presidential office and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport pressured the Statistics Office to delete the phrase “an increase of 867,000 non-regular workers in 2019” from the employment statistics and replace it with “incomparable.” They also pressured the Statistics Office to cover up income distribution inequality, which was announced as “the worst ever.”
The prosecution also reported that when household income distribution inequality for the first quarter of 2018 was announced as the worst ever, former presidential economic advisor Hong Jang Pyo had the Statistics Office provide basic statistical data containing personal identification information. Based on this data, he produced a result indicating that income inequality in individual labor improved due to the effect of the minimum wage increase.
