Judge May Grant Korean Bail in Iraq Oil Scandal 
By Reuters
January 17, 2006
The New York Times
Original Source: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-crime-iraq-probe.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal magistrate judge said on Tuesday he may grant bail to a South Korean lobbyist charged in the United Nations' Iraqi oil-for-food scandal despite prosecutors' contentions he was guaranteed to flee.
Magistrate Judge Theodore Katz first wants to determine if lobbyist Tongsun Park also has a British passport that prosecutors say he is hiding.
The suspect will remain in jail pending another hearing next week. Park is accused of taking more than $2 million in Iraqi payoffs while secretly lobbying on behalf of Saddam Hussein's government.
``I think there are conditions ... for release,'' Magistrate Judge Theodore Katz said in U.S. District Court.
The U.N. oil-for-food program was set up in 1995 to allow Iraq to sell oil to buy civilian goods for its people living under U.N. sanctions after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
The program administered some $67 billion worth of oil, and U.S. and U.N investigations have found that lobbyists, U.N. and Iraqi officials enriched themselves through kickbacks and bribery.
At issue on Tuesday was whether Park, 70, should be let out of jail while defending himself. Park, who wore an orange jail uniform at the hearing, was detained in Mexico on January 6 and ushered to Houston and later New York.
Katz cited Park's poor health and the relatively short maximum sentence of five years for his alleged offense as reasons for accepting the defense proposal of granting him bail at $2 million and monitoring his movements electronically.
Federal prosecutor Stephen Miller contented it was a ''guarantee'' that Park would jump bail because ``you need not look further than his history.''
But Katz disagreed, finding that Park did not flee his 1977 indictment for bribery in the ``Koreagate'' scandal. Katz accepted the defense argument that Park was in South Korea at the time of his indictment, which was later dropped when Park cooperated with the authorities.
Katz also disagreed with the prosecutors' claim that Park wrongly fled a 2004 subpoena to testify as an oil-for-food witness -- a summons delivered to Park while he stayed at Washington's Watergate hotel.
``He left (the United States for South Korea) with government knowledge. He did not leave by dark of night,'' the magistrate judge said.
The case will continue on January 26 when Katz also hopes to clarify whether Park is wanted for avoiding paying a $600,000 judgment in an unrelated civil case.