Conservative PPP submits bill to scrap CIO, accuses body of conducting illegal probe of Yoon
Published: 03 Feb. 2025, 19:07
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- MICHAEL LEE
- [email protected]
![The exterior of the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking officials in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi, on Jan. 22. [YONHAP]](https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/data/photo/2025/02/03/659724f5-6cf9-47cb-81d7-37f03632df19.jpg)
The exterior of the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking officials in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi, on Jan. 22. [YONHAP]
The conservative People Power Party (PPP) submitted a bill on Monday to abolish the agency that spearheaded the investigation into impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol's short-lived imposition of martial law.
PPP Rep. Park Jun-tae, who co-sponsored the bill along with 14 other lawmakers from his party, said the bill is intended to reduce public expenditure on the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials (CIO), which he characterized as “having achieved very little through its investigations, to say nothing of securing indictments, despite having an annual budget of 20 billion won ($13.6 million) since it was established by a parliamentary act in 2021.”
Park also accused the CIO of “forcibly pursuing an illegal investigation against the president, which it has no authority to conduct, to overcome its own existential crisis,” echoing earlier remarks by PPP officials that the agency lacks the legal mandate to detain and question a sitting president.
That argument was rejected by the Seoul Central District Court earlier this month when it upheld the validity of Yoon’s arrest warrant in response to a challenge mounted by his lawyers.
Park also accused the CIO of betraying the purpose of its establishment as a “human rights-abiding” alternative to the state prosecution service by denying Yoon visitations by anyone except for his lawyers and forbidding him from exchanging letters or messages with friends and family outside the Seoul Detention Center, where he is being held.
The CIO transferred control over its investigation into Yoon to prosecutors last month.
The PPP bill proposes the reallocation of all the CIO’s ongoing investigations to the state prosecution service and a mass reassignment of its officials to the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office and other regional prosecution branches.
The proposed legislation would also remove all references to the CIO and the CIO chief across some 20 laws that have been passed since the agency’s establishment.
According to data submitted by the CIO to Park’s office, the agency has accepted 6,527 cases for investigation since operations began in March 2022 but referred 1,026 to other investigative bodies.
Of the remaining 4,660 cases handled directly by the CIO, the agency obtained indictments for just four while recommending to the prosecution five other cases.
In an earlier call for the CIO’s abolition on Jan. 23, PPP floor leader Kweon Seong-dong blasted the agency as a “dinosaur-like organization that has wasted 120 billion won” over the course of its existence and called on the liberal Democratic Party (DP) to “acknowledge that the body they created is useless and join talks to scrap it.”
Conservative Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon, who has been mentioned as a potential presidential candidate in domestic media, also criticized the CIO as a “harmful leftover of the [previous] Moon Jae-in administration’s botched and deformed attempt to reform the state prosecution service” and said gutting the agency is “the way to regain the people’s trust.”
However, the PPP is unlikely to find abolishing the CIO easy given its minority status in the 300-member National Assembly, where the rival DP holds 170 seats.
Although some DP lawmakers aligned with party leader Lee Jae-myung have suggested scrapping the CIO, most DP lawmakers are widely believed to support the agency’s continued existence.
BY MICHAEL LEE [[email protected]]
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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