Requiem For A Policy

The three suicide notes Chung Mong Hun, 54, left on his desk beside his watch and glasses before leaping from the window of his 12th-floor office last week provided few clues to his motives. (Chung apologized to his family in a few scribbled lines, gave encouragement to a colleague and, in a note to his employees, wrote: "A foolish man does a foolish thing.") But few men in South Korea could have had more burdens to bear. Chung, one of eight sons of the late Chung Ju Yung, pioneering chaebolist and founder of the Hyundai group, had been demoted in the Hyundai empire from group chairman to overseer of Hyundai Asan, the subsidiary that specializes in tourism and industrial investments in North Korea. He was on trial for his still-murky role in the clandestine transfer of at least $450 million to North Korea in 2000, money allegedly used to secure North Korean participation in a groundbreaking inter-Korean summit that year. (The Hyundai group is alleged to have contributed $100 million.)

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Those investments turned out to be as financially disastrous as they were politically contentious. Chung, a shy man whose passion was to bring the two Koreas together through commerce, took these setbacks personally. "He wanted to be seen as contributing to Korean reconciliation," says a South Korean lawmaker. "Instead he was criticized by the public." In the week before his death, prosecutors grilled Chung three times—in sessions lasting up to 12 hours—over another issue altogether: a $13 million slush fund paid for by the Hyundai group that prosecutors allege was set up by a top aide to former President Kim Dae Jung. After his suicide, prosecutors said Chung might have actually channeled $21 million into the fund. Former President Kim isn't currently under investigation for the slush fund or the summit pay-offs to North Korea; with Chung's death, he might never be. At a wake for Chung, a teary Hyundai Asan president Kim Yoon Kyu was heard in a TV news broadcast to say: "The chairman fell on his sword to end this whole thing."