A presidential panel was launched Friday here with the mission of seizing the assets of South Koreans given as rewards for pro-Japanese activities in the early 20th century.
The joint government body, comprising 104 officials from the justice and home affairs ministries, police and the tax office, will take charge of selecting the targets of seizure, tracing property owned by them and deciding whether to revert their assets to the state or not, officials said.
An inauguration ceremony was held at its office in central Seoul with scholars, civic group officials and lawmakers in attendance.
"Clearing off assets by Japanese collaborators is meaningful in invigorating the spirit of the Korean nation and materializing social equity," Kim Chang-kuk, chairman of the committee, said, at the ceremony. "I hope our committee will be able to hit as many home-runs as Lee Seung-yeop, the baseball player who marked his birthday today."
Initial targets of investigation will be the assets owned by some 400 descendants of pro-Japan collaborators acquired during the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945, they said. The body started preliminary investigations in April.
The panel can also start investigations at the request of the state or local governments and courts.
Confiscated assets will be first used to support the descendants of Korean independence fighters, who mostly lived in destitution under pressure from Japanese colonizers, officials said. But assets whose ownership was already moved to a third party in a justifiable manner are exempt from the seizure, they added.
The establishment of the panel is based on a special law enacted in December to confiscate the assets of collaborators who endorsed Japanese colonization on the Korean Peninsula.
It marks the first time in 57 years that South Korea will take such action against Korean citizens who actively cooperated with the Japanese occupation. A similar move was foiled in 1949 due to strong protests from the collaborators.
In South Korea, public pressure has been mounting for assets acquired by collaborators during the Japanese occupation to be returned to state coffers.
Under the law, officials will be empowered to ask foreign governments, most likely those of Japan, China and Russia, to cooperate in the seizure of the assets, according to the officials.
Some of the descendents of collaborators, such as of Lee Wan-yong, who helped spearhead Japan's colonization in his capacity as a government minister akin to today's prime minister, have won two court rulings to exercise their rights over the properties.
There are as yet few statistics about how much wealth the Japan collaborators built.
Baek Dong-hyun, a research fellow at the Institute for Research in Collaborationist Activities in Seoul, has suggested that Korean aristocrats received 6.05 million yen at that time, or 360 billion won (US$360 million) in today's currency, from the Japanese government as reward for their cooperation with Japan's moves to usurp Korea's sovereignty in the early 1900s.
Seoul, Aug. 18 (Yonhap News)
Gov't launches panel for seizing assets of Japan collaborators |
