The man we call Citizen Kim, properly known as 52 year old South Korean Won-Hong Kim has been indicted to stand trial for embezzlement in South Korea. News reports from South Korea say that he was indicted on Monday on charges of conspiring with the jailed chairman of the country's third largest conglomerate in a massive embezzlement case. That Chairman for SK Group, Chey Tae-won was convicted of embezzling nearly $45 million US Dollars from the group. Citizen Kim was a former adviser to SK Shipping is accused of participating as an accomplice in the embezzlement scheme, as the man responsible for the chairman's investments. When the Chairman went on trial in 2011, he fled South Korea for China and turned up in Taiwan in July where he was arrested for an immigration offence. That's when maneuvers were put in motion to fraudulently get him a Belize passport. That was personally seen to by Elvin Penner who signed the nationality certificate and the passport, and by his own words "(saw) to it that (Kim) would get proper attention and would get his passport the same day."
Penner's driver picked up the passport at the Immigration office on September ninth and days later a diplomat from another country, we are told, conveyed the passport to Kim in jail.
Flags came up at the Belize Embassy in Taiwan when Kim, or his agents tried to call on the embassy to use its offices to intervene on his behalf as a citizen of Belize – and save him from extradition to South Korea. But when officials at the embassy checked the date on his passport, they noted that it was produced while he was in prison. That led to calls to Belize's Immigration Department – which found no nationality file for Kim. And the rest, as they, say, is history…, or in this case, history still unfolding.
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