Police Decide Not to Prosecute Han Dong-hoon's Daughter on 'Spec Building Suspicion'

The police investigating the 'speculation allegations' regarding the daughter of Han Dong-hoon, the Emergency Response Committee Chairman of the People Power Party, have closed the case without prosecution.

Handonghun, Emergency Response Committee Chairman of the People Power Party.
Photo by Asia Economy DB

On the 16th, the Anti-Corruption and Public Crime Investigation Unit of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency announced that on the 28th of last month, they decided not to prosecute Han and his daughter, Ms. A, due to lack of evidence. This comes about 1 year and 8 months after a civic group filed a complaint against Chairman Han with the police.

The civic group raised suspicions that a significant portion of the paper Ms. A presented at an overseas academic conference in 2022 was plagiarized using a 'sentence rewriting' method, where words were changed. Additionally, in February of the same year, suspicions of ghostwriting arose as the document information of the paper registered by Ms. A included the name of a ghostwriter from Kenya.

At the parliamentary confirmation hearing held in May of the same year, Chairman Han explained, "Although it is called a paper, it is not at the level of an actual academic paper but rather short writings at the level of a high school student's practice report."

The police judged that regarding the plagiarism allegations, it was difficult to consider that the journal in which the paper was published underwent a sufficient review process, and therefore did not recognize it as obstruction of business. Regarding the ghostwriting allegations, they determined that "the complaint was filed solely based on the complainant's speculation, and there are not enough concrete reasons or circumstances to initiate an investigation."

There was also an allegation that Ms. A received help from a professional developer and paid 2 million won during the process of submitting an app to a U.S. app development competition in 2019. The police requested the organizers to submit the original app files and competition judging regulations, but were unable to obtain the materials due to personal information protection reasons, and thus could not confirm any criminal charges.