Prosecutors on Thursday indicted a group of former senior officials of the previous Moon Jae-in administration on charges of manipulating housing price data to make it look like their policies were working .he Daejeon District Prosecutors Office indicted 11 people without physical detention, including former presidential chief of staff for policy Kim Su-hyun and Kim Sang-jo, and former Land Minister Kim Hyun-mi on charges of abuse of authority and violations of the Statistics Act. even presidential aides and land ministry officials under the previous Moon administration were accused of pressuring the Korea Real Estate Board (REB), an affiliate of the land ministry, to manipulate the fluctuation rate of housing prices across the greater Seoul area on 125 occasions. They allegedly ordered prior reports or revisions to be submitted to the presidential office three times a week before key statistics were compiled and announced from June 2017 to November 2021.As a result, REB data showed housing prices in Seoul rose only by 12 percent, but actual transaction prices reported by dealers recorded an 81 percent jump during the period.
By law, statistics agencies are banned from providing data to other government agencies prior to the announcement to prevent undue influence during the compiling process REB officials asked for a halt in the practice 12 times, but former presidential policy chief Kim Sang-jo reportedly dismissed the request with threats of a potential budget cut. our others, including former presidential policy chief Kim Sang-jo and the head of Statistics Korea, Kang Shin-wook, were indicted on charges of skewing employment data on the number of nonregular workers to make it look favorable to the government. This is the first Statistics Act violation case where the government abused its power, and directly violated the accuracy and neutrality of national statistics,” Seo Jeong-sik, deputy chief of the Daejeon District Prosecutors’ Office, said .It has been found that the presidential office systematically manipulated national statistics or distorted statistics survey results for a long time as housing prices soared due to a failure in real-estate policy and nonregular workers rose despite job policies,” he said. he prosecution said it will propose a revision of the Statistics Act, citing its low level of punishment, with violators punishable by up to three years in prison or up to 30 million won ($22,762) in fines Prosecutors launched the investigation after the audit agency requested they look into alleged data manipulation by 22 high-ranking officials in the previous Moon government in September 2023. Eleven others who made the list were cleared of the charges, prosecutors said, including the head 카지노사이트킹 of the REB.