SEOUL, - Prosecutors raided the Presidential Archives for the second day in a row Friday as part of a probe into alleged economic data manipulation by the previous Moon Jae-in government, officials said.
Prosecutors and investigators from the Daejeon District Prosecutors Office began their search of the archives in the central administrative city of Sejong on Thursday to view the Moon administration's documents related to the suspected data manipulation, they said.
The Board of Audit and Inspection said last month that the previous administration exerted undue pressure on government agencies to manipulate official data on income, employment and housing prices to support its key economic and real estate policies. The audit agency has requested the prosecution investigate 22 former government officials, including all four former presidential chiefs of staff for policy. Moon was not included in the probe.
Earlier this month, prosecutors raided Statistics Korea, the Korea Real Estate Board (KREB) and the land, finance and labor ministries to seize related documents and computers and have conducted data forensics on them. A ranking Statistics Korea official was also summoned as a witness.
The audit agency suspects that Moon's presidential office and the land ministry exerted undue influence on the KREB to manipulate real estate data at least 94 times between 2017 and 2021.
Source: Yonhap News Agency