Photo : YONHAP News
A court has granted a pretrial detention warrant for a senior official at the Presidential Security Service(PSS) and a broker on charges of colluding with a contractor to inflate construction costs for the relocation of the presidential office to Yongsan from the Cheong Wa Dae compound.
The Seoul Central District Court on Thursday issued the warrant for the PSS official surnamed Jeong and a construction broker surnamed Kim on charges of bribery and fraud, citing a flight risk.
In October last year, the Board of Audit and Inspection(BAI) asked the prosecution to investigate the case after confirming that a company that had won a contract to install bulletproof glass windows at the new presidential office submitted a false estimate that inflated the construction cost.
Jeong, who supervised the construction, named Kim, one of his acquaintances, as the project manager for the construction in March 2022, and Kim arranged a contract between the bulletproof glass installion company and the PSS and the interior ministry to install bulletproof glass windows in the top office and official presidential residence for two-point-04 billion won.
According to the BAI, Kim created a shell company in the process and inflated the construction cost.
The state auditor determined that the actual cost of the construction was found to be around 470 million won, with Kim pocketing the difference of one-point-57 billion won.