摘要
In the summer of 2001, after years of opposition, the Korean National Assembly passed and President D.J. Kim signed a new Anti- Corruption Act (“ACA”). Apart from whistle-blower protections, however, the ACA in its present form contains little of substance, its independent counsel provisions having been stripped away by the ruling party. Given that Korean law has long outlawed bribery, we are skeptical about the potential benefits of the ACA, which in part exhorts the nation to prevent corruption. It seems unlikely that telling people to be virtuous will make them so. Corruption has been a crime since 1953, and there has been a series of anti-corruption programs and laws since 1993, when the popularly elected civilian President Y.S. Kim took office. The prior reforms either worked or they didn’t. If they did work, why was the ACA necessary? If the earlier efforts failed, why did that happen? This article discusses private sector and official corruption in Korea, recounts the reform efforts including the ACA, and concludes that the reforms are unlikely to be effective without the establishment of an independent prosecutor. The system that produced Korea’s economic development eroded its own base. Corruption was an inescapable feature of the relationship among Korea’s government, banks and chaebol during the decades of development from the early 1960s to the mid 1990s, and it was also at the root of the 1997 crisis. It may now threaten the success of the post-1997 corporate governance reforms, which assume independent decision makers on boards of directors, in audit firms and in the regulatory bodies. There have been several high profile cases in 2000 and 2001; the business community complains about it but does little to effect remedy; and at least one analyst concluded that the educated middle class are so demoralized by persistent corruption that they are leaving Korea. This is something more than inevitable and universal criminality. Were this garden-variety stuff, newspapers wouldn’t be editorializing, NGOs wouldn’t be campaigning, and the government wouldn’t be announcing new programs.