LAND SCANDAL FIGURE FOUND DEAD

[Anchor Lead]

Kim Moon-ki, a Seongnam Development Corporation official in charge of the controversial land development project, was found dead Tuesday evening. He had been questioned several times as a person of interest in relation to the massive urban development scandal. Police are looking into the circumstances surrounding his death.

[Pkg]

Kim Moon-ki, a Seongnam Development Corporation director, was found dead in his office at 8:30 P.M. Tuesday. This is the second case of an SDC official associated with the Seongnam land development scandal dying. It's been only eleven days since Yoo Han-gi, former chief of the development project headquarters, took his own life on December 10th.

[Soundbite] "What did you collect?"

No suicide note was found but police believe homicide is unlikely. Kim was an official overseeing the controversial development project up until early this year. He also served as an evaluation committee member when a consortium was selected as a preferred bidder in 2015. A member of this consortium was Hwacheondaeyu, the asset management company for the Seongnam development project. Until recently the prosecution and police questioned him several times as a key person of interest in the massive scandal. He was reportedly grilled about the evaluation of priority negotiating partners as well as why a clause about excessive profit retrieval was omitted in the Daejangdong project contract signed between SDC and Hwacheondaeyu. Kim told the press in October that he and other working-level officials had commented that excessive profit should be returned to the city. The investigation team at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office in charge of this case said Kim wasn’t being investigated and no search and seizure was carried out on him. He was notified Tuesday morning that the company’s internal audit office decided to vote on heavy disciplinary action and considered reporting him to the authorities for showing internal documents to lawyer Jeong Min-yong, a key figure in the scandal who had left the corporation in September. Police plan to question his family and associates and find out the exact circumstances surrounding his death.