Word: kim
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...might have thought Kim Seung-youn had everything a business titan could want. He sat atop his family's multibillion-dollar Hanwha Group, one of South Korea's largest conglomerates, running an empire of chemical, finance and energy firms and a chain of resorts. He had his own baseball team, the Hanwha Eagles, and loved to sip soju, a fiery libation, as he and his employees watched them play. But apparently one thing was missing: international prestige. So Kim turned to Republican heavyweight Tom DeLay's former chief of staff, Ed Buckham, in early 2001 to develop what Buckham...
...achieve something that ambitious would require three commodities prized in Washington: visibility, access and lots of money. In this case, those ingredients came together in June 2001 in the form of a tax-exempt charity--the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council (KORUSEC), which Buckham's firm formed and Kim funded. But if KORUSEC's goal was to make important people start paying attention to Kim, it may have worked too well. KORUSEC is one of a number of nonprofit organizations that have been caught in the controversy that now surrounds DeLay, who's facing questions about his fund raising...
...some tax-exempt organizations, the question is whether their charitable works are an end in themselves--or a means to one. KORUSEC's stated goals included working for peace on the Korean peninsula and building stronger ties between U.S. and Korean leaders. But KORUSEC strengthened Kim's own ties in Washington as well. As chairman of KORUSEC, Kim--virtually its only donor--was host to a procession of congressional delegations through Korea, sat in the House gallery as DeLay's guest of honor at President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address and later that year met with Vice...
...filings with the Internal Revenue Service indicate it pays Buckham's Alexander Strategy Group $5,000 a month in rent for a Georgetown office where repeated calls by TIME were answered only by a machine featuring the voice of a long-departed executive director. In addition, one of Kim's subsidiaries--Universal Bearings Inc., a manufacturer in Indiana--has paid Buckham's firm $600,000 since 2001 for what its federal filing describes as lobbying "on the strong political, economic and security relationship between the Republic of Korea and the United States...
...from Harbour to the Glover Park Group and taken the KORUSEC account with him--says he was hired "to recruit Democrats to go on trips." He insists, however, that the excursions were serious endeavors with briefings by Korean officials and a trip to the demilitarized zone. As for elevating Kim's image with the delegations, Johnson insists, "It was never the purpose ever stated to me." In the meantime, defining exactly what charity is, and how it should be bestowed, has become Washington's latest investigative mission. --With reporting by Donald Macintyre/ Seoul and Mark Thompson/Washington