Seoul: A special counsel team, led by Min Joong-ki, conducted a raid on the headquarters of the main opposition People Power Party (PPP) on Thursday. This action followed a tense seven-hour standoff with party members who resisted surrendering evidence in an investigation connected to former first lady Kim Keon Hee.
According to Yonhap News Agency, the special counsel executed the search warrant after unsuccessful efforts to access the PPP office in western Seoul to obtain the party’s membership list. The investigation centers on allegations that members of the Unification Church joined the PPP en masse before the party’s 2023 leadership race to sway the outcome in favor of Representative Kweon Seong-dong, a former close associate of ex-President Yoon Suk Yeol.
The investigative team believes that Kim, Yoon’s spouse, may have requested a former Unification Church official, through a shaman contact, to orchestrate this mass membership in November 2022. Representative Kweon eventually withdrew from the leadership contest.
Despite earlier requests by the special counsel for the PPP to voluntarily submit relevant evidence, the party’s refusal and subsequent blockade of the counsel’s entry prompted the enforcement of the search.
PPP spokesperson Park Sung-hoon criticized the raid, which sought to confiscate “the entire membership of 5 million PPP members.” Park expressed concerns about the demand for sensitive information, including account details of both new and existing members.
The special counsel aims to secure the party’s membership roster to cross-reference it with the Unification Church’s list, in order to verify the claims about the mass sign-ups. Previous attempts to search the PPP’s headquarters on August 13 and 18 were thwarted by party members who argued that the counsel’s actions were an attempt to seize extensive personal data.