The National Assembly's Trade, Industry, Energy, SMEs and Startups Committee is moving to hold a hearing on investment in the Honam semiconductor cluster, calling Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Jay Y. Lee and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won as witnesses. The stated aim is to determine whether the government exerted pressure during the selection of the cluster site.
Kim Sung-won of the People Power Party, who chairs the committee, has recently been pushing to hold a hearing with Lee and Chey each called as a witness, according to a committee official on the 28th. Koo Ja-keun, the People Power Party lawmaker serving as the party's floor manager on the committee, has also agreed to the plan.
The People Power Party is focusing on what it says was a shift in Chey's position on investing in semiconductors in the Honam region. At a seminar hosted by the Korea-China Parliamentarians' Union at the National Assembly in late April this year, Chey voiced a negative view of investment in the Honam semiconductor cluster. Asked whether there were plans to build a chip plant in Jeollanam-do, where energy is abundant, he struck a cautious note, saying it was true that plants should go where electricity is available but that whether a chip plant in particular had to go there was a question he was weighing. The party suspects that government pressure lay behind the abrupt reversal in Chey's position two months later. The government has said it presented candidate sites to the companies and that the companies chose one of them.
The difficulty lies in the process of convening a hearing. Under the National Assembly Act, a hearing on a general agenda item requires a committee vote. If the Democratic Party of Korea does not cooperate, the hearing would effectively fail to take place. A hearing held to review a bill, by contrast, can be convened at the request of at least one-third of the committee's members. Because People Power Party lawmakers alone could meet that threshold, one option is to open a hearing on grounds such as review of the mega special zone bill. Still, the Democratic Party plans to handle that bill in the National Policy Committee, prompting observations that an actual hearing may be difficult to convene in the industry committee.
