The Prosecution Goes Too Far
The prosecution forbade GM Korea president & CEO Kaher Kazem from leaving South Korea on March 3. He is currently in litigation regarding an illegal worker dispatch allegation and is scheduled to become an SAIC-GM vice president on June 1.
The prosecution started investigations in 2019 and his overseas travel ban continued for 16 months until early last year. He filed an administrative suit and won it in April last year. The prosecution imposed another ban the very next month.
His allegation is that he illegally dispatched 1,700 subcontractor workers, and the first trial is in progress. Non-regular GM Korea employees raised a question in 2005 and the Supreme Court accepted it in 2013.
According to the prosecution, the ban is because he may not appear in court, this guess is not groundless in that several foreign automakers’ heads in South Korea avoided court appearance by going on a business trip, and the examples include former Audi Volkswagen Korea CEO Johannes Thammer and former Mercedes-Benz Korea CEO Dimitris Psillakis.
Experts point out that the president of GM Korea is different from them and the prosecution is going too far. “He has been very cooperative in the investigation, accepted his term extension at the end of 2020 despite the investigation and trial, and voluntarily returned from a business trip to the United States in just several days in April last year, when his overseas travel ban was temporarily lifted,” one of them said, adding, “Foreign enterprises will choose not to send experienced and competent executives to South Korea if the same is repeated.”