GL Chemical (4)
Im Changsik, the party leader, met privately with one of the senior Supreme Council members, Park Seongju.
The two men had been in politics together for a long time, and in private they were close enough to call each other brother and little brother.
“Shouldn’t we try to rein in Namgoong Seok?”
Park Seongju shook his head.
“I’ve tried talking to him several times, but he simply won’t listen. Even after I warned him that he could face disciplinary action, he just told me to go ahead and try.”
Im Changsik let out a sigh.
“Well, that was always the kind of man he was.”
That was exactly why he had urged him to join the party in the first place, but who would have thought he’d go and make such a headache of things?
“What about pushing a bill through the party?”
Park Seongju shook his head again.
“If we suddenly push legislation like this with the presidential election coming up, it could backfire on us instead.”
The conglomerates were already warning that if a bill regulating spin-offs and listings passed, they would not sit still.
“Are you saying the companies might take collective action?”
“Yes. If the major corporations announce they’ll cut investment and hiring, the public will get nervous. Then the New Korea Party will launch a political attack, saying we’re stoking anti-business sentiment and handing power to forces that will wreck the national economy.”
The biggest issue in this election was the economy.
That was why Im Changsik had spent so long trying to cultivate the image of a capable, fair-minded economic expert.
“But we can’t just side with the companies, either.”
“Then the minority shareholders will turn around and accuse us of not even seeing them as citizens.”
Either choice meant getting blamed.
In situations like this, the best course of action was usually to say nothing at all.
If only it weren’t for Namgoong Seok...
Im Changsik sighed and asked, “Then what do you suggest?”
“How about this?”
“You have a good method?”
“We oppose legal regulation on the grounds that it could interfere with corporate employment and investment, but instead we call on companies to regulate themselves.”
For a moment, that caught his interest.
“You mean tell the companies to come up with their own shareholder protection measures?”
“Yes. That way, we can at least look as though we’re regulating them, and we won’t provoke the companies’ backlash. We buy ourselves some time this way and watch how public opinion moves before we respond.”
“Hmm.”
It did sound like a decent approach.
After thinking it over for a while, Im Changsik nodded.
“That would be best.”
After repeated demands for an official response, Im Changsik, leader of Woori Kookmin Party, announced the party’s position.
In other words, they would not regulate by law and would instead tell the companies to make their own countermeasures.
Once the head of the ruling party, and the most likely next president, declared that he would not pursue legal regulation, the conglomerate groups let out a collective sigh of relief.
The Federation of Korean Industries immediately issued a statement welcoming the move.
Most experts also judged the move to be reasonable and desirable, and the New Korea Party did not object in any meaningful way.
But Namgoong Seok said with cold sarcasm, “Corporate self-regulation is nothing more than an illusion. The phrase itself is a contradiction in terms. Either something is voluntary, or it is regulation. What on earth is ‘self-regulation’ supposed to mean? The most famous example of so-called self-regulation is the ‘random box self-regulation’ carried out by Korean game companies. And what was the result? Entrusting shareholder protection to corporations is no different from leaving a fish in charge of the cat.”
“This is the chance to regulate it properly by law.”
Dongho senior spent the entire day sitting in front of his computer, staring at GL Chemical’s stock price and the news.
Unlike his usual lazy self, he was positively brimming with energy. An investor had to invest, after all. Even if that meant driving the price down.
“It’s not dropping as much as I expected.”
GL Chemical’s share price had now stopped falling at 750,000 won.
“It’s a little different from Thomas Motors or LD Studio.”
Those two had been caught outright committing fraud, but GL Chemical was a solid, healthy company.
The only question was how to value GL Entech’s stake ahead of its post-spin-off listing. That, and that alone, would determine the company’s worth.
Korean securities firms were churning out buy reports day after day, so it was easy to forget that abroad, there were plenty of people issuing sell reports and shorting the stock.
But only a tiny fraction of them ever succeeded.
People weren’t fools.
The current stock price was the price decided by every market participant, all of them together. Raising or lowering it however one wished was no easy task.
In fact, it was only because Continue Capital was involved that the price had been pushed down by even 25 percent.
“Woori Kookmin Party pulled out the self-regulation card.”
“I figured they would.”
During the first timeline, after public opinion turned against the GL Entech listing, self-regulation was introduced.
As expected, that self-regulation did not include a ban on listings after spin-offs or stock dividends in kind.
Instead, the companies acted as though they were offering shareholders some great favor by giving them priority subscription rights when a subsidiary went public.
But subscription rights only mattered when the offering price was low. If the price was high, taking up the subscription could just mean swallowing a loss.
The reason Im Changsik was making such nonsense talk about self-regulation was simple.
They couldn’t just leave the matter alone, but legal regulation would be too burdensome. No matter what they did, backlash was going to erupt, so they had chosen a compromise of sorts.
In short, he didn’t want to lose votes from either side.
That kind of indecisive man became president, and the country ended up in the state it did.
No policy or law could satisfy everyone.
If you were president, there were times when you had to push something through even if people opposed it—like building a dormitory that local residents didn’t want, or passing regulations that companies hated.
“Now that I think about it, nothing strange should happen this time, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Last time, after we went after the Hanjeong Group, the Financial Supervisory Service even raided us.”
“That happened, yes.”
Somehow, that also felt like ages ago. Then again, a lot had happened since.
“This time, nothing should happen.”
GL Group kept its distance from politics. It had no personal ties with the president, and it certainly hadn’t been bribing him.
President Oh Yeonghwan’s term was ending this year, anyway. So there was no reason he would go out of his way to target us over some conglomerate we weren’t even that close to.
But as soon as I heard that, a good idea came to me.
“Let’s go after the Blue House.”
“...Huh?”
Dongho senior looked at me as if he had misheard.
“Y-you’re not talking about charging at the Blue House in a bus, are you?”
“No. I just mean we should rope the president into this matter.”
“Why?”
“Because we need revenge for what happened last time.”
This time, he really did hear me correctly, because his mouth fell open.
“N-no! Why would we go after a president who’s just sitting there minding his own business? What crime has our president committed?”
The way he jumped to defend him made him look suspicious.
Could he have voted for Oh Yeonghwan in the last election?
“What crime? He’s got a whole truckload of corruption behind him.”
“Even so, it wouldn’t have anything to do with this issue.”
That was true, but...
“Ah, who cares?”
“Then what does matter?”
“What matters is that I want revenge.”
“... ”
If we tied the president into this, the whole affair would become much bigger than it already was.
I met a man at a café.
“It’s been a while.”
“You’ve been well, I hope?”
He was tall and lean, wearing horn-rimmed glasses. His clothes were jeans and a checked shirt, and his strong eyebrows gave him a distinctive look. He was in his mid-thirties.
His name was Min Hong-soo.
He was a reporter for News Trigger.
I first met him while exposing the Primus incident.
At the time, he had been working for Zhongheung Economic Daily, but after writing a piece that took aim at the administration, he fell out of favor with the higher-ups and ended up moving to News Trigger, an internet newspaper.
Then, from there, he wrote an explosive story shedding light on illegal dealings between President Oh Yeonghwan and the Hanjeong Group.
Because we’d built up some trust back then, I kept feeding him various sources afterward, including ones on LD Studio and other matters.
Thanks to that, News Trigger had become one of the stronger players among the many internet newspapers out there.
“What did you want to meet about today?”
He looked like he was hoping I might hand him a story.
I decided to meet that expectation.
“You know about the GL Entech listing issue, right?”
He nodded.
“Of course. It’s the biggest issue out there right now. Continue Capital announced it was going to short the stock—do you know the background behind that?”
He looked as if he wanted me to spill anything useful as quickly as possible.
I tossed him a bone with plenty of meat still on it.
“Do you know that the Blue House may be involved in this matter?”
His eyes widened at once.
“The Blue House? Is that really true?”
I handed him the materials and began my explanation.
“Choi Si-deok, who is President Oh Yeonghwan’s nephew by marriage, works at CreditOne Korea. It’s a private equity fund established by CreditOne Capital of Australia in joint venture with KD Bank. One of the funds it managed held GL Chemical stock, but it sold everything right before the spin-off. After that, the National Pension Service voted in favor of GL Entech’s spin-off proposal.”
“And you’re saying Choi Si-deok is connected to that?”
“Yes. CreditOne Korea earned fees for advising the GL Group on the GL Entech listing, and it’s participating in the institutional offering for GL Entech as well. And right on cue, the president’s nephew by marriage, Choi Si-deok, was promoted to head of asset management. Was all of this really just a coincidence?”
He read through the documents I’d given him with great care.
“Is this true?”
I nodded.
“Yes. Why would I lie? I think corruption like this needs to be made widely known to the public.”
After checking the articles, President Oh Yeonghwan was stunned.
“W-what the hell is this?”
He had engaged in countless acts of corruption up to this point. He’d received bribes through a shell foundation and granted all kinds of favors to companies.
But...
“This isn’t it!”
He swore to God he had never taken even a single won from the GL Group.
He called his wife first.
“Do you know anything about this?”
“I-I don’t know anything. I barely even keep in touch with my brother.”
President Oh Yeonghwan barked back angrily.
“Then why the hell would this article come out!? Why is that bastard working at a private equity fund of all places!”
His wife looked wronged and on the verge of tears.
“I really don’t know, honey. I didn’t even know Si-deok was working at a private equity fund until now.”
The first lady had five siblings.
And the number of nephews and nieces on her side was thirteen. How was he supposed to know what any of them were doing or where they worked?
He tried to find out whether someone else had pocketed money in the middle and done this without him, but there really was no connection to this matter at all.
It had all been awkwardly stitched together from the mere fact that the president’s nephew by marriage worked at a private equity fund.
The National Pension Service generally voted in favor of whatever the conglomerates did. The GL Entech spin-off was no different.
And nearly every investment company participated in the GL Entech offering. In fact, it would have been harder to find a firm that didn’t participate.
Even so, the article gave the impression that the president had supported the spin-off to do a favor for the company his nephew by marriage worked for, and that he was backing GL Entech’s listing.
President Oh Yeonghwan roared in fury.
“Those son of a bitches! What kind of so-called media writes this kind of false article? No wonder people call them gutter trash!”