Kim Keon-hee (left photo), the wife of former President Yoon Suk-yeol (right photo), now faces the possibility of arrest. On August 7, special counsel Min Joong-ki's team, which is investigating various allegations involving Kim, filed a request with the court for her arrest warrant. If the warrant is granted while former President Yoon remains in custody, it would mark an unprecedented situation in which a former president and his or her spouse are detained at the same time. The team has also failed in its second attempt to execute a detention warrant against Yoon due to his strong resistance.

Oh Jeong-hee, assistant special counsel on Min’s team, said at a briefing that day, “We have filed a request for an arrest warrant for Kim.” The special counsel team has charged her with violating the Capital Markets Act, the Political Funds Act, and the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Crimes (bribery through influence peddling). Oh added, “We determined that she meets all the requirements for pretrial detention, so we applied for the warrant.” The team concluded that Kim’s complete denial of the charges during questioning the previous day, coupled with concerns over destruction of evidence, met the legal threshold for pre-indictment detention.

Kim is accused of colluding with former Deutsch Motors chairman Kwon Oh-soo and others around October 20, 2010, to engage in stock manipulation (in violation of the Capital Markets Act). The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office, which previously investigated the same case, decided not to indict her on October 2 last year, but the special counsel team concluded the evidence was clear and sought her arrest. She is also suspected of accepting, without payment, multiple opinion poll results from political broker Myung Tae-kyun ahead of the presidential election in 2022 and, in return, intervening in the nomination of former People Power Party lawmaker Kim Young-sun in the parliamentary by-election in June 2022 (violation of the Political Funds Act). In addition, she allegedly accepted expensive gifts between April and August 2022 from the Unification Church through Jeon Seong-bae, a shaman known as Geon Jin, in exchange for lobbying public officials to secure favorable action on various personal or organizational requests submitted to government agencies. Kim appeared before the special counsel team the previous day for questioning but denied all charges, saying either “I don’t know” or “That’s not true.” Her detention hearing is scheduled for August 12 at the Seoul Central District Court.

Meanwhile, the special counsel team tried to execute the arrest warrant for former President Yoon by bringing him from the Seoul Detention Center to the interrogation room, but failed. “We attempted to carry out the warrant by using measures such as physical force, but halted execution after accepting on-site concerns that his strong resistance could cause injury,” the team said. On August 1, Yoon had also refused to comply, resisting in his underwear when the team attempted to execute the warrant. The court-issued warrant expired on the 7th.