[인터네셔널헤럴드트리뷴]에 실린 김윤 예비회원의 관련 기사입니다.
번역을 해서 올리면 좋겠지만, 제가 좀 바빠서... ㅎㅎ
By Donald Greenlees International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 2005
SEOUL A bust of Lenin sits on a shelf in the office of Kim Yun in the Gwanghwamun district of Seoul. But the statue is a vestige of his old beliefs.
Nowadays, the bookshelves of Kim, a former student activist and labor rights campaigner, also include titles like "Winning," by Jack Welch, the former General Electric chief executive.
Kim is an odd product of corporate South Korea; a member of a small fraternity of onetime political troublemakers who landed jobs in management because of a generous and controversial benefactor, Kim Woo Choong, the disgraced former owner of Daewoo Group.
At a time when no other conglomerate owner was likely to consider hiring a man like Kim Yun, who had once been imprisoned as a leader of rowdy student protests and labor disputes, the founder of Daewoo hired 100 such young men over several months in 1995.
It was a typical act. With a reputation as a showman, Kim Woo Choong often broke the conservative mold with his business practices, winning admirers and critics.
Now, the Daewoo founder is behind bars and standing trial in connection with currency violations and a vast accounting fraud perpetrated as his overstretched business empire collapsed in 1999 under $75 billion in debt. And he is dividing Koreans between those who see him as a symbol of corrupt corporate practices and those who respect his contributions to South Korean industry.
Kim Yun remembers being invited to the Chinese restaurant at the Daewoo-owned Seoul Hilton in November 1995, along with 11 other former student activists. There, a short and energetic man in owl-like spectacles offered them jobs.
The 12 agreed, inspired by the older man's zeal and his vision for the future of Korea.
"He wanted political activists who had been perceived as the enemy of the corporations," Kim Yun said.
"He believed that students that participated in political demonstrations were the cleverest and were more challenging."
A decade earlier, Kim Yun had spent a year in jail and been beaten by police for leading a violent demonstration on the campus of Seoul National University.
The trial of Kim Woo Choong, which began Aug. 9 in the Seoul Central District Court, is more than the final chapter in the country's greatest corporate scandal.
Also on trial is a long history of collusive political and business practices in South Korea.
The rise and fall of Kim Woo Choong mirrors the success and failure of an economic model in which big family-owned conglomerates, called chaebol, were the engines of export-led growth.
But the chaebol, like Daewoo, owed their rapid growth to close ties to the government. Favored businesses, investing in nation-building projects, received access to cheap credit at the government's direction.
In turn, the chaebol paid off politicians and bureaucrats and funded political campaigns. Until the 1997 economic crisis brought about a third of the top 30 chaebol down, there was an implicit guarantee of government protection.
Kim Woo Choong found that the guarantee had evaporated in 1999. With Daewoo mired in short-term debt, struggling to make a profit and on the brink of bankruptcy, Kim fled, spending six years in hiding abroad until he returned this to face charges.
The scandal is South Korea's equivalent of the U.S. WorldCom or Enron, and it is seen as a test of whether politicians and the law enforcement authorities are serious about fighting corporate misconduct.
Despite the symbolic importance of the case, Koreans are divided over how harshly Kim should be punished.
Campaigners for improved corporate standards would cheer if the court sent a signal that corporate crime would be dealt with firmly.
Kim Woo Chan, an associate professor at the Korea Development Institute, said that while South Korea had done a good job of improving corporate regulation in recent years, "in enforcement it has been very weak."
Recently an appeals court upheld an accounting fraud conviction against Chey Tae Won, chairman of the oil refiner SK Corp., but he has not been jailed and has been allowed to remain at the helm of the company.
A recent poll of national legislators by a local television network and market research company found that 39.9 percent of lawmakers thought Kim should be pardoned. More than two-thirds replied that they believed politicians had received slush funds from him.
At a meeting of the Federation of Korean Industries on June 16, Lee Kun Hee, chairman of Samsung Group, the biggest chaebol, called on the court to show clemency, saying Kim had given "hope and courage" to Korea's youth.
James Rooney, a business consultant in Seoul, said balancing the need to be tough on corporate crime with the circumstances of Kim's offenses was a tricky issue for society and the court.
"Had it been a black-and-white situation where everyone else was pure, they would have brought him back and strung him up," Rooney said. "You don't want people who destroyed billions of dollars of the nation's wealth living an easy life. But he was not the only one in that game. He was an extreme version of what everyone was doing."
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/08/17/business/daewoo.php
번역을 해서 올리면 좋겠지만, 제가 좀 바빠서... ㅎㅎ
By Donald Greenlees International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 2005
SEOUL A bust of Lenin sits on a shelf in the office of Kim Yun in the Gwanghwamun district of Seoul. But the statue is a vestige of his old beliefs.
Nowadays, the bookshelves of Kim, a former student activist and labor rights campaigner, also include titles like "Winning," by Jack Welch, the former General Electric chief executive.
Kim is an odd product of corporate South Korea; a member of a small fraternity of onetime political troublemakers who landed jobs in management because of a generous and controversial benefactor, Kim Woo Choong, the disgraced former owner of Daewoo Group.
At a time when no other conglomerate owner was likely to consider hiring a man like Kim Yun, who had once been imprisoned as a leader of rowdy student protests and labor disputes, the founder of Daewoo hired 100 such young men over several months in 1995.
It was a typical act. With a reputation as a showman, Kim Woo Choong often broke the conservative mold with his business practices, winning admirers and critics.
Now, the Daewoo founder is behind bars and standing trial in connection with currency violations and a vast accounting fraud perpetrated as his overstretched business empire collapsed in 1999 under $75 billion in debt. And he is dividing Koreans between those who see him as a symbol of corrupt corporate practices and those who respect his contributions to South Korean industry.
Kim Yun remembers being invited to the Chinese restaurant at the Daewoo-owned Seoul Hilton in November 1995, along with 11 other former student activists. There, a short and energetic man in owl-like spectacles offered them jobs.
The 12 agreed, inspired by the older man's zeal and his vision for the future of Korea.
"He wanted political activists who had been perceived as the enemy of the corporations," Kim Yun said.
"He believed that students that participated in political demonstrations were the cleverest and were more challenging."
A decade earlier, Kim Yun had spent a year in jail and been beaten by police for leading a violent demonstration on the campus of Seoul National University.
The trial of Kim Woo Choong, which began Aug. 9 in the Seoul Central District Court, is more than the final chapter in the country's greatest corporate scandal.
Also on trial is a long history of collusive political and business practices in South Korea.
The rise and fall of Kim Woo Choong mirrors the success and failure of an economic model in which big family-owned conglomerates, called chaebol, were the engines of export-led growth.
But the chaebol, like Daewoo, owed their rapid growth to close ties to the government. Favored businesses, investing in nation-building projects, received access to cheap credit at the government's direction.
In turn, the chaebol paid off politicians and bureaucrats and funded political campaigns. Until the 1997 economic crisis brought about a third of the top 30 chaebol down, there was an implicit guarantee of government protection.
Kim Woo Choong found that the guarantee had evaporated in 1999. With Daewoo mired in short-term debt, struggling to make a profit and on the brink of bankruptcy, Kim fled, spending six years in hiding abroad until he returned this to face charges.
The scandal is South Korea's equivalent of the U.S. WorldCom or Enron, and it is seen as a test of whether politicians and the law enforcement authorities are serious about fighting corporate misconduct.
Despite the symbolic importance of the case, Koreans are divided over how harshly Kim should be punished.
Campaigners for improved corporate standards would cheer if the court sent a signal that corporate crime would be dealt with firmly.
Kim Woo Chan, an associate professor at the Korea Development Institute, said that while South Korea had done a good job of improving corporate regulation in recent years, "in enforcement it has been very weak."
Recently an appeals court upheld an accounting fraud conviction against Chey Tae Won, chairman of the oil refiner SK Corp., but he has not been jailed and has been allowed to remain at the helm of the company.
A recent poll of national legislators by a local television network and market research company found that 39.9 percent of lawmakers thought Kim should be pardoned. More than two-thirds replied that they believed politicians had received slush funds from him.
At a meeting of the Federation of Korean Industries on June 16, Lee Kun Hee, chairman of Samsung Group, the biggest chaebol, called on the court to show clemency, saying Kim had given "hope and courage" to Korea's youth.
James Rooney, a business consultant in Seoul, said balancing the need to be tough on corporate crime with the circumstances of Kim's offenses was a tricky issue for society and the court.
"Had it been a black-and-white situation where everyone else was pure, they would have brought him back and strung him up," Rooney said. "You don't want people who destroyed billions of dollars of the nation's wealth living an easy life. But he was not the only one in that game. He was an extreme version of what everyone was doing."
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/08/17/business/daewoo.php