
A joint prosecution-police team in South Korea concluded its 237-day investigation into alleged collusion between politics and religion, resulting in the arrest and indictment of Shincheonji Church founder Lee Man-hee and the seizure of 26 billion won from Unification Church leader Han Hak-ja's private safe, with investigations covering election interference, tax evasion, embezzlement, and illegal political donations.
AI-generated summary
The investigation began on January 6, 2024, focusing on alleged collusion between politics and religion, specifically examining claims that the Shincheonji Church coerced members to join the People Power Party to influence election results from 2021 to 2024, and that the Unification Church made illegal political donations and embezzled funds.
SEOUL, Aug. 31 (Yonhap) -- A joint prosecution-police team investigating suspected collusion between politics and religion concluded its activities Monday, 237 days after its launch on Jan. 6.
The team achieved notable results, including the arrest and indictment of Lee Man-hee, founder of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a nonmainstream religious sect, and the seizure of 26 billion won (US$18.9 million) in cash from the private safe of Unification Church leader Han Hak-ja.
The team had investigated allegations of Shincheonji coercing its members into joining the People Power Party (PPP), tax evasion and embezzlement of funds, as well as the Unification Church's illegal donation of political funds and embezzlement of church funds.
Consequently, four Shincheonji officials, including Lee, were arrested and indicted, with 12 other officials indicted without detention. Lee and other church officials were accused of forcing church followers to join the PPP with the aim of influencing the results of various elections from 2021 to 2024. During the period, at least 56,472 members joined the PPP.
In connection with the Unification Church, 16 people, including Han, were indicted without detention. Among them, summary orders were sought for six church officials whose involvement in the alleged crimes was deemed relatively minor.
The investigation team suspects that the Unification Church illegally donated a total of 189 million won to 132 politicians from 2019 through last year in an effort to promote closer ties with politics and secure the support of friendly politicians.
Meanwhile, a Seoul district court was set to rule later Monday on Han's bribery case that includes charges of giving luxury gifts to the wife of former President Yoon Suk Yeol.
AI outlook โ possibilities, not facts
The Seoul district court will rule on Han Hak-ja's bribery case later on August 31, 2024.
Very likely ยท Within hours

๋ฏผ์ฃผํํํต์ผ์๋ฌธํ์๋ 1~4์ผ ์ธ์ฒ ์ธ์คํ์ด์ด ๋ฆฌ์กฐํธ์์ ์ 22๊ธฐ ๋ฏธ์ฃผ์ง์ญํ์๋ฅผ ๊ฐ์ตํ๋ค. ์๋ฌธ์์๋ค์ด ์ ์ฑ ์ ์์ ์ ์ถํ์ผ๋ฉฐ, ํ์ ๊ธฐ๊ฐ์๋ ๋ถ์ผ๋ณ ๋คํธ์ํฌ ํ์์ ์์ํ ๋ก ์ ํตํด ํ๋ฐ๋ ํํ๊ณต์กด์ ์ํ ํ๋๊ณํ๊ณผ ์ฐ๋ ๋ฐฉ์์ ๋ ผ์ํ๋ค. ๋ฏผ์ฃผํํต์ ์ด๋ฒ ํ์๊ฐ ๋ฏธ์ฃผ์ง์ญ ์๋ฌธ์์๋ค์ ์ ๋ถ ํํ๊ณต์กด ์ ์ฑ ์ดํด๋ฅผ ๋์ด๊ณ ํ๋ฐ๋ ํํ๋ฅผ ์ํ ์ฐ๋๋ฅผ ๋ค์ง๋ ๊ณ๊ธฐ๊ฐ ๋ ๊ฒ์ด๋ผ๊ณ ๊ธฐ๋ํ๋ค.

๊ตญ๋ฏผ์ํ ์์ข ๋ ์์์ ์ฑํ๋ฑ๊ฐ์กฑ๋ถ ์ฅ๊ด ํ๋ณด์์ธ ๊ธฐ๋ณธ์๋๋น ์ฉํ์ธ ์์์ด 21โผ22๋ ๊ตญํ์์ ๋ํ๋ฐ์ํ ๋ฒ์ 116๊ฑด ์ค ์ฑํ๋ฑ๊ฐ์กฑ์์ํ ์๊ด ๋ฒ๋ฅ ์ ๋จ ํ ๊ฑด๋ ์๋ค๊ณ ์ง์ ํ๋ค. ๋ค๋ง ๊ณต๋๋ฐ์๋ก๋ 21๋ ๊ตญํ 20๊ฑด, 22๋ ๊ตญํ 6๊ฑด์ด ์๋ ๊ฒ์ผ๋ก ๋ํ๋ฌ๋ค.

์ฌ์ผ๋ ์ ๊ธฐ๊ตญํ ์ฒซ๋ ์ธ ๋ด๋ฌ 1์ผ ์ ์ฑ ์์ํ ์์ฅ๋จ ์ ์ฑ ํ์๋ฅผ ์ด์ด ๋ฏผ์ ๊ณตํต ๋ฒ์ ์ฒ๋ฆฌ ๋ฐฉ์์ ๋ ผ์ํ๋ค. ๊ตญ๋ฏผ์ํ ์์ด์ ์ ์ฑ ์์์ฅ์ ์ด๋ฒ ํ๋์ด ๋ํ์ ํํ์ ์ ์น๋ฅผ ๋ณต์ํ๋ ์ถ๋ฐ์ ์ด ๋๊ธธ ๊ธฐ๋ํ๋ฉฐ ๋ฏผ์ฃผ๋น์ ํ์กฐ๋ฅผ ๋น๋ถํ๋ค. ์์ ๋ฒ์์ ์์์ ํํ์ ํตํด ํฉ๋ฆฌ์ ๊ฒฐ๋ก ์ ๋์ถํ๊ณ , ์ํ ์ค์ด๋ผ๋ ๋ฌธ์ ์ ์ด ํ์ธ๋๋ฉด ๊ณผ๊ฐํ ๊ณ ์น๊ณ ๋ณด์ํ์๊ณ ์ ์ํ๋ค.

๋ถ์ฐ์๊ฐ 9์ 2์ผ ๊ตญ๋ฏผ์ํ ๋ถ์ฐ์๋น๊ณผ ์์ฐ์ ์ฑ ํ์ํ๋ฅผ ์ด๊ณ ๋ด๋ ๊ตญ๋น ํ๋ณด ๋ฐฉ์์ ๋ ผ์ํ๋ค. ์์ ๋ฏผ์ฃผ๋น๊ณผ๋ ํ์ํ์ผ๋ฉฐ, ๋ฌด์์ ํ๋ํ ์์๊ณผ์ ๊ณต์กฐ๋ ๋ชจ์ ์ค์ด๋ค.

์๊ท๋ฐฑ ๊ตญ๋ฐฉ์ฅ๊ด์ด ์ทจ์ 1๋ ์ฌ ๋ง์ ๊ต์ฒด ์์์ ๋ฐ์ผ๋ฉฐ, ํ์์ผ๋ก ์ง๋ช ๋ ๊ฐ์ ์ฒ ์ฃผ์ฌ์ฐ๋์๋ผ๋น์ ๋์ฌ์ ๋ํ ์ธ์ฌ์ฒญ๋ฌธํ ์ค๋น ํ์คํฌํฌ์ค๊ฐ ๊ตญ๋ฐฉ๋ถ์์ ๊ตฌ์ฑ๋์๋ค. ์ ์ฅ๊ด์ ๋ณต๋ฌด ์ดํ ์ํน์ ์ฌ์ฐจ ๋ถ์ธํ๋ฉฐ ์๊ฐ์ ๋ฐํ๋ค.

South Korea's unification ministry announced it will not attend the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok this week, despite prior participation and speculation about a potential summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines.