Seoul to extend audit of former Seongdong-gu mayor's Mexico trip by one month

The Seoul Metropolitan Government will extend by one month a public interest audit related to former Seongdong-gu District Mayor Jung Won-oh's official overseas trip to Cancun, Mexico, it was confirmed Thursday.

The audit review committee under the Seoul Metropolitan Government's Citizens' Audit Ombudsman Commission voted Thursday to extend the resident audit period covering Jung's 2023 official overseas trip.

"There are legal matters that require more time to review, so we decided to extend the audit period," a commission official said. The audit began June 25 and had originally been scheduled to conclude Monday. With the extension, it will now run through Sept. 23.

Under the Seoul Metropolitan Government ordinance governing the Citizens' Audit Ombudsman Commission and resident audit requests, the commission must complete an audit within 60 days of deciding to conduct one and notify the representative of the petitioners and the head of the audited agency or department of the results within 10 days. The period may be extended if there is a legitimate reason that makes completion within the original timeframe difficult.

More than 300 Seongdong-gu residents filed a resident audit request with the commission in April, calling for an investigation into why Jung had traveled to Mexico in 2023 with a specific female civil servant and why that employee's gender had been incorrectly recorded as male in official documents. During the election, Jung's camp said the employee who accompanied him was not only responsible for the relevant work but also handled all practical affairs of the delegation, and that "raising an issue simply because the official is a woman goes beyond basic human decency and constitutes an outrageous negative campaign." The camp added that the gender error in the overseas trip review document was a simple clerical mistake by the district office, and that redacting personal information such as gender and date of birth when providing documents in response to external requests is standard practice. "We intend to hold those responsible for groundless negative campaigning accountable," it said.

Meanwhile, the Board of Audit and Inspection recently told the Seoul Metropolitan Council that a resolution the council passed in June urging a public interest audit into the so-called Agissi-dang allegations was not sufficient on its own to open an investigation. A Seoul Metropolitan Council official said the board communicated by phone that a resolution alone cannot initiate an audit and suggested other avenues, such as filing a formal public interest audit request.

The Seoul Metropolitan Council had said in its resolution that an audit was needed to examine the circumstances under which the Seongdong-gu district office — despite indications it had pursued the project on the premise of receiving the Agissi-dang facility as a donated asset — reversed course near the project's completion and declared it would not accept the donation, as well as the legal basis for that decision, the appropriateness of the related decision-making process, and whether the principle of protecting legitimate expectations and other relevant laws and administrative principles had been violated.

The council also said that if the project had been pursued on the premise that association members' assets would be used for construction, relocation and compensation costs of the Agissi-dang facility with the expectation of a donated asset transfer, and that transfer was subsequently dropped, "this raises serious questions about the very premise on which the project was undertaken."

The Agissi-dang allegations surfaced during the June 3 local elections. Jung, who was then the Democratic Party of Korea's candidate for Seoul mayor, is alleged to have directed the redevelopment of the Haengdang 7 zone in Seongdong-gu during his tenure as district mayor in a way that required the redevelopment association to build a 4.8 billion won ($3.42 million) shamanist ritual hall — known as an agissi-dang, or "young lady's shrine" — through a donated-asset arrangement, only to later refuse to take ownership of the completed building and instead demand a cash payment in lieu of the asset transfer, causing financial harm to the redevelopment association.