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SEOUL, Sept. 19 (Yonhap) — A special counsel team has confirmed a list of some 110,000 suspected Unification Church members in its raid against a company managing the membership database of the main opposition People Power Party (PPP), legal sources said Friday. Special counsel Min Joong-ki’s team carried out a search and seizure against the company Thursday over allegations of Unification Church members joining the PPP en masse ahead of the party’s leadership race in 2023, reportedly to support a particular candidate. Min’s team suspects former first lady Kim Keon Hee — the wife of former President Yoon Suk Yeol — may have requested the move to a former church official through a shaman in November 2022. During the raid, the team crosschecked a list of 5 million PPP members with a roster of 1.2 million Unification Church members secured in an earlier raid, which appeared to show an overlap of some 110,000 individuals. It is unclear how many of those individuals had voting rights for the 2023 leadership race. An estimated 740,000 party members had such voting rights at the time. The team is expected to focus on when the suspected church members joined the party to check the allegations. The PPP said in a statement that the special counsel team had seized a list of Unification Church members, but declined to confirm the number of the individuals. The raid comes after the team made multiple attempts to secure the party’s membership list at its headquarters, which failed due to opposition from PPP lawmakers. submitted by /u/coinfwip4 |
Special counsel confirms list of 110,000 suspected Unification Church members in raid against firm managing PPP database
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