Cho Seong-eun 'Forgery of Party Membership Application' Moves to Second Trial... Prosecution Also Appeals for 'Cross Appeal'

[Financial News]  Cho Seong-eun, known as the whistleblower of the so-called 'Prosecution Service Scandal', was sentenced to a suspended prison term in the first trial for forging party membership applications during the process of founding a new party. Both the prosecution and the defendant appealed the verdict.
According to the legal community on the 21st, Cho, who was tried on charges of document forgery and violation of the Political Party Act, submitted an appeal to the Seoul Southern District Court about 4 hours after the verdict was announced on the 10th. Subsequently, the prosecution also filed an appeal on the last day of the appeal period, the 17th, resulting in a cross appeal.
Cho and others were tried for forging 1,162 party membership applications to fill the required 5,000 members needed to establish a new party called 'Brand New Party' in February 2020.
Cho, who was the chairman of the party's preparatory committee at the time, needed to recruit 5,000 members to merge with the Future United Party, which was about to be launched. When registering a political party's city and provincial branches, membership applications containing the names, dates of birth, addresses, contact information, and occupations of members whose intention to join is confirmed must be attached.
It is reported that on February 14, 2020, Cho sent a message to Kim Jong-gu, the former ambassador to Mongolia, asking him to obtain a list of people to be registered as party members. The former ambassador then called the Secretary-General of the Overseas Veterans Association of the Republic of Korea the next day, saying, "If you lend me the list of the Hapkido Association or the Overseas Veterans Association, I will copy it and use it beneficially," and later received data containing the personal information of 18,197 Vietnam War veterans.
Accordingly, the prosecution viewed that Cho, based on the list, forged 1,162 party membership applications in the names of Vietnam War veterans with Lee Jae-seop, the former chairman of the Brand New Party's Gyeonggi Province branch. In the previous closing argument, the prosecution stated, "The defendant does not acknowledge the crime at all and does not even reflect," and demanded a sentence of 1 year and 6 months in prison for Cho.
The first trial court pointed out, "The defendants wrote 1,162 party membership applications without confirming the individual intentions after receiving the list and made false reports," and "The forgery of party membership applications can undermine the credibility of party politics itself, which represents political intentions, and have a negative impact on elections, causing significant harm." The court sentenced Cho to 1 year in prison with a 2-year suspension.
However, Cho expressed his intention to seek a second trial judgment after the sentencing. He stated, "I have proven all matters of the process and actions, but the court did not even judge and extracted only unilateral and malicious content that should be excluded from the numerous pieces of evidence," and "I will correct everything."

welcome@fnnews.com Jang Yu-ha Reporter