Ex-customs officers indicted over seized wine scheme

Two former Seoul Regional Customs officers have been indicted on charges of taking 30 million won ($20,400) to help a wine trader steal smuggled wine they had seized.

The wine was seized in late July 2023 from a warehouse in Jeonju, North Jeolla, where customs officers took 379 bottles. Prosecutors estimate the pair would have made about 500 million won had they diverted the whole lot. The most expensive bottle was a Romanée-Conti, the Burgundy grand cru that yields only 5,000 to 6,000 bottles a year, valued at 36 million won.

Investigators found the wine had been smuggled into Korea over a period stretching from 2013 to 2021. It cleared customs declared as grape juice or as goods carried in by travelers.

Customs learned the location of the bottles through a tip from a worker in the wine trade. A month after the seizure, two officers at the Seoul regional customs investigation and intelligence division approached the tipster with a proposal. They wanted 30 million won up front, and said the money was for lobbying the supervising prosecutor and the warehouse manager. It was paid.

The two knew where the system was soft. Customs turns seized goods into cash through public auction when they are hard to store or lose value over time, and tests them beforehand for authenticity and for narcotics. Wine is the exception. Opening a bottle destroys its value, so seized wine has always been written off and destroyed rather than sold. Because the bottles were headed for destruction anyway, the officers planned to source dummy bottles, the empties used for shop displays, and switch them for the real ones.

The plan died at the prosecutor's desk. The officers reported, as customs always does, that they intended to destroy the seized wine. Under current law, customs officers hold first-instance investigative powers in smuggling cases as special judicial police, but they work under a prosecutor's direction and supervision.

The prosecutor ruled that 363 of the 379 bottles had to go back to their original owner, because the seven-year statute of limitations on smuggling under the Customs Act had run out.

That left the officers holding money they could no longer earn. In December 2023, they went back to the tipster and promised to divert at least the remaining 16 bottles, worth about 56 million won. They also asked for 40 million won more. In return, they said, they could secure a large reward for reporting the smuggled wine. This time the tipster refused and went to the police.

One of the two is also charged over a reward he collected on a separate case. A fellow customs officer tipped him off in March 2022 about a scheme to evade duty on height-growth supplements. Customs officers cannot claim reward money themselves, so he drew up a false report presenting his younger sister as the source, using a proxy filing system meant to protect informants' identities. The government paid out 75 million won the following March. He has since returned it.

Police opened an investigation in January 2025 into the two and sought arrest warrants for bribery under the Criminal Act. Prosecutors sent the case back for further work. The officers had been paid to broker matters outside their authority as public officials, prosecutors said, which falls under the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Crimes and carries a heavier penalty. Police did as asked. Warrants were issued on June 30, and prosecutors indicted the two on Friday and kept them in custody.

Lawyers have read the case as the criminal justice system working as designed. A prosecutor's power to direct and supervise special judicial police is what turned up the corruption inside the agency under supervision.

That power is about to go. The Public Prosecution Office Act, pushed through by the ruling Democratic Party and its allies, removes prosecutors' authority to direct and supervise special judicial police when the prosecution service is reconstituted as a public prosecution office on Oct. 2. Authority over the disposal of seized goods is still under discussion. One proposal would hand it to the police.

"Seized goods are evidence, so there is a need to look at ways of leaving final disposal authority with the prosecutor, to keep it under judicial control," Ahn Dong-geon, the first deputy chief prosecutor at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office, said at a briefing on Monday.

BY KIM SEONG-JIN [[email protected]]