Prosecutors said Friday they had arrested two Hyundai Motor executives and a former bank official in a widening graft probe of South Korea's number one automaker.
Lee Jung-Dae, vice president in charge of finance and accounting, and Kim Seung-Nyun, chief of the firm's procurement division, were detained late Thursday, said senior prosecutor Chae Dong-Wook.
"We arrested Kim and vice president Lee ... after we obtained concrete evidence showing they were involved in the creation of Hyundai's slush fund," Chae told a press conference.
Park Sang-Bae, a former vice president of the state-run Korea Development Bank, was arrested Friday over his role in the bank's controversial decision in 2002 to reschedule the debt of ailing Hyundai Motor units.
Park became the eighth person to be arrested since the probe began last month following the arrest of a well-connected business lobbyist charged with bribing politicians and government officials.
Chae said the three were being held on a 48-hour warrant, after which they would be either freed or face indictment.
After allegations emerged that millions of dollars in cash paid out by the lobbyst came from Hyundai, prosecutors last month raided Hyundai Motor offices and the premises of several affiliates, taking away truckloads of company records.
The arrest last month of lobbyist Kim Jae-Rok, a business consultant who served in 1997 as an aide to then-president Kim Dae-Jung, led prosecution authorities to Hyundai Motor, South Korea's second largest business group with some 40 affiliates.
Prosecutors have questioned Hyundai officials to see whether lobbyist Kim used Hyundai's money for his activities.
Last month they arrested Lee Ju-Eun, the president of Glovis, a Hyundai affiliate that ships the company's cars world-wide, on charges of paying millions of dollars to Kim to solicit business favours for Hyundai Motor, the world's seventh ranked automaker.