[Editorial] Fourth-year blues?

Prosecutors are investigating a bribery case involving a top Board of Audit and Inspection official ― a scandal that will have grave political implications. It is regarded as one of the numerous scandals of similar or greater magnitude that will certainly come during the final years of the Lee Myung-bak presidency.

The criminal suspect, Eun Jin-su, is the first BAI commissioner to resign on suspicion of bribery. He allegedly took hundreds of millions of won in bribes from Busan Savings Bank.

The Council of Commissioners is the state watchdog’s highest decision-making body. The seven-member council is empowered, among other things, to determine whether or not to press charges against public employees when an audit or inspection has concluded they are suspected of crime.

Eun, whose job was to help determine whether an errant public official should be prosecuted or given a lesser discipline, turned himself into a criminal suspect. He is suspected of lobbying for the savings bank when it was being inspected by the BAI. This suspicion alone tarnished the BAI’S public image as a constitutionally empowered agency. No one would be blamed for wondering if the BAI, which disclosed last year that savings banks were in a mess, is now in a mess itself.

Another irony is that Eun was a prosecutor-turned commissioner. He gained fame when he arrested influential figures, including the head of the Daejon High Prosecutors’ Office, who were involved in a 1993 slot machine bribery scandal. Now it is his turn to be put to shame. Like the disgraced senior prosecutor, he will be questioned by a junior prosecutor.

Neither the damage done to the BAI nor his personal humiliation can compare with the impact his case will have on the political community. It has dealt a deadly blow to the ruling Grand National Party and President Lee, given his connections to them.

Eun was a spokesman for the ruling party in 2004 and Lee’s legal counsel when he was running for the presidency in 2007. He also provided Lee with legal advice in a litigation involving the presidential candidate. When Lee was elected president in December 2007, Eun served as legal adviser to his transition team.

No wonder President Lee was outraged when he received a report on the scandal. He is quoted as saying that no stone should be left unturned in investigating the case. Still, much of the responsibility lies with the president, given that he appointed his protg to the post of commissioner, overriding public concerns about the political neutrality that was required of him.

It is concerning that the scandal may be a prelude to what is yet to come during his final years in office. In the fourth year of the five-year presidencies of his predecessors, if not earlier, scandals involving those close to them invariably began to crop up. Two of the former presidents had the harrowing experience of watching their sons being prosecuted.

One keen observer says information damaging to presidential confidants or protgs starts to flow to the outside world in the fourth year of the presidency and such information regarding the president’s family and relatives in the final year. Lee’s senior aides reportedly suspect that much of the confidential information guarded by government agencies is now being channeled to the opposition camp as well. If true, it is an unmistakable sign that Lee is losing his hold on the bureaucracy.

Lee’s waning power, however, should not be of any concern to prosecutors required to look deeper into Eun’s connection to Busan Savings Bank. Nor can it be gloated over by the opposition. Schadenfreude is the last thing it can afford, given that its management was close to the previous administration.