なぜ韓国人は、嫌われるのか？

All have denied the charges, with Samsung denouncing Kim's allegations as "malicious."

But the company's problems deepened when a former anti-corruption advisor to President Roh came forward to say he had been a target of a Samsung bribe. Lee Yong-chul said that a Samsung executive tried to bribe him in 2004, the roughly $5,000 in cash offered in a package disguised to look like a book. Lee said he refused the money.

Last week, the South Korean parliament passed a bill calling on Roh to appoint an independent investigator to look into the allegations against Samsung. Roh's critics worried he might veto the measure, fearing that a wide-ranging investigation of Samsung could reveal unseemly financial links between the company and his own 2002 campaign for president. But this week he bowed to public pressure and accepted the appointment of the prosecutor.

"I think the bill has many problems both legally and politically," Roh said at a news conference in Seoul, denying that he accepted "congratulatory money" from Samsung. But he said he did not have the political support to veto the bill and had "decided people want to know the truth of the allegations implicating the nation's largest conglomerate."

Few South Koreans seemed overly shocked that one of the country's mammoth business conglomerates -- known as chaebols -- would try to bribe public officials or woo allies in the media with cash and gifts. South Korea's chaebols were built on intimate ties with military governments of the 1960s and have long records of being tainted by corruption. In February, Chung Mong-koo, chairman of Hyundai Motor Co., was convicted of embezzling more than $100 million from the company to create a slush fund that prosecutors said was used for bribery.

Chung received a three-year prison term, but his sentence was commuted to community service when the court ruled that his incarceration would have too detrimental an impact on the South Korean economy.

What instead has surprised people is the increasing willingness of whistle-blowers to step forward with detailed allegations against the most powerful people in South Korean society.

"It's the first initiative that's difficult to make," says Father Kim In-kook of the Catholic Priests' Assn. for Justice, an organization respected for its role in opposing the authoritarianism of dictator Park Chung-hee in the 1970s. The priest says whistle-blower Kim Yong-chol came to the church group for protection after other organizations shied away from taking on Samsung.

"There are many people who suffered because of Samsung's corruption and injustice and who could not speak out because they felt weak as an individual," Father Kim says. "Now that two people have come out with courage, others might feel encouraged to give witness and make a better society."

Some observers see a sign of evolution in the scandals' airing.

"Most people believed or suspected this sort of thing was always going on and took it for granted," says Lee Ji-soo of the Center for Good Corporate Governance in Seoul. "The difference this time is that someone has come forward to speak out against it, and there are more people prepared to say that this is not acceptable.

"There is a generational divide in Korea," Lee says. "And the younger generation is saying that Korea can't move forward unless we overcome that old way of thinking to become a more transparent society."


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