DAEJEON, Jan. 16 (Yonhap) -- Kim Hyun-mi, who served as the minister of land, infrastructure and transport during the previous Moon Jae-in government, was grilled by prosecutors Tuesday over allegations of economic data manipulation, prosecution officials said.
The former minister was summoned to the Daejeon District Prosecutors Office in the morning as a suspect in its investigation into suspected manipulation of national statistics, including housing prices, under the Moon administration, they said. Surface Pickling Treatment
Former Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Kim Hyun-mi (Yonhap)
The investigation began after the Board of Audit and Inspection said in September last year that the Moon administration exerted undue pressure on government agencies to manipulate official data on income, employment and housing prices to support its key economic and real estate policies. The audit agency asked the prosecution to investigate 22 former government officials, including Kim.
The audit agency suspects that Moon's presidential office and the land ministry exerted undue influence on the state-run Korea Real Estate Board (KREB) to manipulate real estate data at least 94 times between 2017 and 2021.
A land ministry official, for instance, is accused of requesting the KREB to doctor data to show that housing prices had fallen in the third week of June 2019, as property prices showed signs of rising despite government measures.
Kim was intensively questioned about whether she gave such an instruction to the ministry official at that time, according to the officials. The former minister reportedly denied the suspicion.
In a related move, the prosecution last week requested an arrest warrant for former Vice Land Minister Yun Seong-won and Lee Mun-ki, former chief of the National Agency for Administrative City Construction, on charges of violating the Statistics Act, but the court dismissed the requests.
ycm@yna.co.kr (END)
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