Daewoo Founder Indicted

SEOUL, July 1 2005;(Xinhuanet) South Korean prosecutors on Friday indicted Daewoo Group founder Kim Woo-choong on charges of accounting and loan fraud and foreign currency smuggling, South Korean Yonhap News Agency quoted the Supreme Prosecutors' Office (SPO) as reporting.

The 69-year-old Kim was indicted on charges of ordering his group executives to inflate the assets of four Daewoo companies by 41 trillion won (40.3 billion US dollars) between 1997 and 1998, illegally borrowing 9.8 trillion won (9.6 billion dollars) through using the doctoring of accounting books and fake letters of credit, and smuggling about 3.2 billion dollars abroad between 1997 and 1999.

In addition, he was accused of trading 15.7 billion dollars in foreign currency abroad without permission from the authorities, said Yonhap.

Kim fled South Korea in 1999 when his conglomerate was crumbling under the weight of 80 billion dollars of debt in one ofthe world' s largest business failures.

After almost six-year's fleeing, he returned South Korea in early June and was arrested by the SPO.

Investigators have indicated that they have uncovered suspicious capital transactions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that involved the British Finance Center (BFC) that managed Daewoo's overseas funds.

The London-based BFC is known to be a paper company establishedby Kim to handle cash transactions involving Daewoo's overseas operations.

Under the leadership of Kim, the Daewoo Group, founded in 1967, pullulated from a small textile company to the South Korea's second-largest conglomerate in the 1990s.