Former People Power Party lawmaker Yoo Seong-min said on the 16th that a police decision to refer him to prosecutors over allegations that his daughter received preferential treatment in her hiring as a professor at Incheon National University amounted to a "political investigation," vowing to prove his innocence.
"I have never committed any offense of obstruction of business in connection with my daughter Yoo Dam's appointment as a full-time faculty member in the Department of International Trade at Incheon National University," Yoo said in a statement on the 16th.
"For the past year, police and the Board of Audit and Inspection have combed through dozens of Incheon National University officials in a fishing expedition," he said. "As for the fairness of the hiring review, the professors who directly handled the screening and the university would have testified to everything truthfully."
He added that "even the Ministry of Education was mobilized to pressure Korea University into investigating allegations of self-plagiarism, duplicate publication and salami slicing in her research papers, raised by the Democratic Party of Korea at last year's parliamentary audit, but Korea University's research ethics committee announced findings that there was no problem at all."
Yoo said police and the audit board "are trying to the very end to fabricate a crime that does not exist and pin it on me." He criticized the inquiries as "a political investigation and a political audit driven by political motives to humiliate and suppress me."
"I will bring out the truth in the indictment and trial process ahead and will certainly prove my innocence," he said. "No matter how much they suppress political opponents by using the police as a henchman of security-state rule, they cannot create a crime that does not exist. Political investigations will come back as a boomerang and return as their own karma."
The Anti-Corruption and Economic Crime Investigation Unit of the Incheon Metropolitan Police Agency booked Yoo and three others, including Incheon National University President Lee In-jae, on charges of obstruction of business without detention and referred the case to prosecutors the same day.