S.Korean prosecutors summon ex-president Lee for questioning over corruption charges

SEOUL, March 6 (Xinhua) -- South Korean prosecutors summoned former President Lee Myung-bak for questioning over corruption charges, including bribery, local media reports said Tuesday.

The Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office asked Lee to appear in their office on March 14 for grilling over the alleged corruptions, including bribery and abuse of power.

If he appears, Lee would become the fourth South Korean president in the country's modern history to appear in the prosecution office as a criminal suspect.

Lee, who served his five-year presidency through early 2013, is a predecessor to Park Geun-hye, who appeared in the prosecution office over corruption charges, and then was taken into custody last year. Park was the first leader of South Korea to be impeached.

Lee is suspected of having received tens of millions of U.S. dollars from the National Intelligence Service (NIS), the country's spy agency.

He is charged with encouraging Samsung, the country's biggest family-owned conglomerate, to pay litigation costs for DAS, a South Korean auto parts maker which is owned by Lee's eldest brother Lee Sang-eun but is suspected of being possessed actually by the former president.

DAS invested 19 billion won (17.6 million U.S. dollars) in establishing investment consulting company BBK in 1999, but the BBK faced a lawsuit for stock price manipulation in 2001. Thousands of individual investors lost about 100 billion won (92.8 million U.S. dollars) for the stock rigging.

In the United States, DAS filed a lawsuit against Kim Kyung-joon, a Korean American and former BBK president, and received 14 billion won (13 million U.S. dollars) in damages from Kim through his personal Swiss bank account in February 2011 when the former South Korean president was in office.

Samsung paid the U.S. litigation costs on behalf of DAS, and prosecutors suspected that Samsung paid it in return for Lee's amnesty in December 2009 for Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Kun-hee who had got a suspended jail term at the time for slush funds.

Prosecutors searched Samsung offices in Seoul and Suwon, outskirts of the capital Seoul, for two days from Feb. 8. Enditem