Transition team bows out, offers list of goals for Roh

President-elect Roh Moo-hyun’s transition team disbanded yesterday, asking Mr. Roh to maintain the unaffected attitude of a novice president.
The transition team also announced its government administration goals for Mr. Roh’s five-year term of office. Mr. Roh said that the list of goals would serve as the basis for his administration’s operations and promised that there would be no radical changes.
Government bureaus handling unification, political affairs and diplomacy should build peace on the peninsula through three steps, the transition team said. First, they should continue to reach out to the North to resolve issues related to Pyeongyang’s weapons programs. Second, the government should implement inter-Korean agreements to build military trust. Third, an inter-Korean peace treaty should be concluded, economic ties strengthened and armaments limited.
To uproot corruption of senior government officials, the transition team proposed organizing a special presidential investigative team and a standing independent counsel to look into charges raised by the team.
The transition team called for intense reforms of conglomerates and financial institutions. The team wants to establish legal guidelines to prevent financial institutions from over-lending to conglomerates or the financial firms’ own major shareholders. Ceilings on credit extensions to major shareholders of financial institutions should be lowered, the team said.
But critics said the team’s list of top projects failed to reach much beyond Mr. Roh’s platform for the Dec. 19 presidential election, amounting only to a summary of the candidate’s campaign pledges.
The transition team was applauded, however, for its transparent personnel administration system, in which it compiled public recommendations online and offline. Mr. Roh’s nationwide debate tour with a range of local leaders before his inauguration was also considered successful.
The transition team clashed with government bureaucrats over its decision to look into the Fair Trade Commission’s decision to nullify penalties imposed on media companies for unfair business practices, and over unifying the mobile phone prefixes of different companies and issuing higher-denomination banknotes.
Lim Chae-jung, head of the transition team, compared the job to ascending a mountain while paving the trail at the same time. Mr. Lim said the team did a good job despite the differences between members, who come from very diverse backgrounds, the absence of specific guidelines and their lack of experience.

by Seo Seung-wook, Kim Sung-tak