Presidential office accused of siphoning earmarked money to fund overseas trips

The presidential office exceeded its official travel budget by 426 million won ($318,000) to cover expenses tied to official trips abroad last year, a liberal lawmaker disclosed on Thursday.

President Yoon Suk Yeol, left, waves next to first lady Kim Keon-hee from the presidential jet at Seoul Air Base in Seongnam, Gyeonggi, after wrapping up a six-day trip to Paris and Hanoi on June 22. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

The presidential office exceeded its official travel budget by 426 million won ($318,000) to cover expenses tied to official trips abroad last year, a liberal lawmaker disclosed on Thursday.

According to data provided to the JoongAng Ilbo by Democratic Party (DP) lawmaker Park Ji-hye, a member of the National Assembly’s Special Committee on Budget and Accounts, Yoon’s office spent a total of 720 million won on overseas trips in 2023, or more than twice the average annual amount over the previous four years.

The presidential office spent approximately 214 million won on foreign trips in 2022, the year that Yoon took office, while former President Moon Jae-in’s administration spent 450 million won on overseas tours in 2021 and 213 million won in 2020.

Although Yoon’s office was originally allocated only 276 million won for overseas travel, the documents disclosed by Park show the presidential secretariat and National Security Office supplemented this amount by drawing 226 million won from the president’s domestic travel budget and 200 million won from funds earmarked for paying rent on office space and event venues.

In the documents, the two departments explained that the end of the critical phase of the Covid-19 pandemic led to an “inevitable increase in demand for overseas business travel [by presidential officials] to properly follow up on working-level cooperation.”

But this argument was not fully accepted by an expert member of the National Assembly’s Steering Committee, who in a report “recognized the need for more financial support” for overseas trips by presidential officials, but also called the appropriation of additional funds earmarked for other purposes “improper.”

In another instance, the Presidential Security Service drew 4.57 billion won from a government reserve fund to cover the cost of providing additional security at the Korea-Pacific Islands Summit held in Seoul last year.

Use of the fund is usually restricted to covering the cost of a government response to an unforeseen contingency.

Although the Presidential Security Service claimed it was forced to draw money from the reserve fund because the “schedule and scale of the event in question was not accurately relayed by the relevant ministry,” that argument was met with skepticism from the same expert on the Standing Committee, who pointed out that the budget for the summit was adopted by the Cabinet in a meeting held in September 2022 and that the Foreign Ministry was allocated 12 billion won to organize the event.

In her comments to the JoongAng Ilbo, Park accused the Yoon administration of misappropriating taxpayer money.

“The government is treating public funds like pocket money even as the country faced a record deficit of more than 50 trillion won last year,” she said, adding that the presidential office has “effectively pulled the wool over the eyes of the people and the National Assembly” by drawing on funds intended for other purposes.

BY KIM JEONG-JAE, MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]