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Our coverage revealed that Ha-seong Jang, Ambassador to China and Sang-jo Kim, former chief of policy at the Blue House, invested a large amount in the Discovery Fund, which caused huge damage due to the suspension of repurchase.
Police are looking into a list with the names and amounts of influential people who have invested in the fund.
Correspondent Lee Seong-hoon.
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In July of last year, the police raided the Discovery Asset Management office and obtained a list file containing the real names and investment amounts of influential people who invested in the Discovery Fund.
This list contains the content that Ha-won Jang, the representative of an asset management company, and his brother Ha-seong Jang, Ambassador to China, invested 6 billion won in his and his wife's name.
The investment was made in July 2017, about two months after Ambassador Jang took office as the current government chief of policy at the Blue House.
Even in the property report disclosed by Ambassador Jang in March 2018, it was found that deposits at a securities company soared by about 4.4 billion won, but the police consider it to be money invested in the Discovery Fund.
Ambassador Jang said in a phone call with SBS, "I invested in the fund with the proceeds of stocks disposed of before the disclosure of the property of high-ranking officials, and there was no preference."
The list also includes the name of former Blue House policy chief Kim Sang-jo.
Kim also invested in the Discovery Fund in July 2017, right after he took office as the Fair Trade Commissioner, and the investment amounted to 400 million won.
Kim explained, "I was in a situation where I could not enter a public office and invest in stocks, so I invested in a private equity fund that I understood well."
In addition, it was confirmed that several professors at Korea University, where Ambassador Ha-seong Jang worked, were also included in the list.
Police believe that the timing and product types of investment by Ambassador Jang, former head of department Kim, and professor of Korea University are similar.
Most common fund victims invested in 'closed-type funds' that cannot be redeemed before maturity, but they appear to be 'open-type funds' where deposits and withdrawals are free mid-term.
[Lee Eui-hwan/Chairman of the National Private Equity Fund Fraud Damage Joint Countermeasures Committee: Selling a closed-type fund to most customers and an open-type fund to certain people didn't give special favors...
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How the asset management company used the list of major investors names and investment amounts is also an issue.
In particular, it is known that the people on the list have questioned whether the investment loss has been preserved and whether they have played a role in this process.
Earlier, Discovery Asset Management explained, "We did not create a separate list of investors and received investor information only as an anonymized number."