People considered close aides to President Lee Jae-myung are being appointed one after another to the financial authorities, state-run banks, and public enterprises. They either attended Chung-Ang University with the president or had ties with him in the legal community where he worked.
According to the financial sector on the 26th, four people appointed under the current administration—Lee Chan-jin as governor of the Financial Supervisory Service, Park Sang-jin as chairman of Korea Development Bank, Kim Sung-sik as president of Korea Deposit Insurance Corporation (KDIC), and Choi Ki-jung as standing auditor at Suhyup Bank—are all classified as close aides to the president.
Governor Lee, who took office in Aug. last year, is a Judicial Research and Training Institute classmate (18th class) of the president and, as an attorney, handled the president's legal defense in the SSANGBANGWOOL "North Korea remittance case." Since the FSS was established in 1999, he is the second governor to come from the legal profession. The first was former governor Lee Bok-hyun, a former prosecutor who took office under the Yoon Suk-yeol administration.
A month later, Park Sang-jin took office as chairman of Korea Development Bank. Born in 1962, Park is two years older than the president but was a law school classmate at Chung-Ang University, a result of the president entering Chung-Ang after passing the middle and college equivalency exams in four years. Park and the president are known to have lived together during college and cooked meals together. During a live-streamed ministerial work briefing on Dec. 19 last year, the president posed sharp questions to attendees but, smiling at Chairman Park, only said, "Work hard."
In Jan. this year, former attorney Kim Sung-sik took the helm of Korea Deposit Insurance Corporation (KDIC). He is a bar exam classmate (28th) of the president and served as defense counsel in the abuse of authority case related to the president's tenure as Gyeonggi governor. Since the KDIC was launched in 1996, all 12 previous presidents came from the economic bureaucracy; Kim is the first president to come from the legal profession.
On the 23rd, Choi Ki-jung, former director general at the Board of Audit and Inspection, who was appointed standing auditor of Suhyup Bank, was also a Chung-Ang University law graduate like the president and Chairman Park. Choi is said to have been quite close with the president and Chairman Park during their college years. After passing the 34th bar exam and completing the 23rd class of the Judicial Research and Training Institute, Choi worked continuously at the Board of Audit and Inspection. This is the first time Choi has worked in the financial sector.