South Korean investigators Sunday stormed the headquarters of the country's top automaker, Hyundai Motor, in a widening corruption probe into a local business lobbyist, officials said.
A team from the Prosecutor General's Office seized some 100 boxes of data from Hyundai Motor's head office in southern Seoul after hours of searching, company officials told AFP.
The seizure followed the Prosecutor General's arrest of Kim Jae-Rok, a 49-year-old business consultant, on Friday for allegedly bribing politicians and officials while negotiating mergers and acquisitions of local firms.
Yonhap news agency said Sunday's seizure was connected to Kim's alleged wrongdoing relating to the merger of Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors in 1998.
An investigator said Kim had taken "billions of won" from a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor called Glovis to lobby then government officials over the Hyundai and Kia merger, Yonhap said.
Prosecutors were not immediately available for comment.
Kim was also suspected of having arranged illegal bank loans for local companies and bribed a range of politicians and government officials to help him carry out his business, according to Yonhap.
Kim, head of Seoul-based business consulting firm Investus Global, has denied any corruption charges.
The Korea Times, a Seoul-based English-language newspaper, said the businessman was a confident of former president Kim Dae-Jung and ranking officials of his administration.
While in office from 1998 until 2003, president Kim Dae-Jung led the corporate restructuring and consolidation of local firms hit badly by the Asian financial crisis.
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