Pak Dong-seon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tongsun Park (born 1935) was a figure in the Koreagate scandal of the 1970s with a reputation as the "Asian Great Gatsby", a socialite who charmed congressmen with his Washington dinner parties and cash payments.
In the early 1990's he owned a members-only club/restaurant called "The Historic Georgetown Club" [1] in Washington, D.C.
In 1992, he was approached by Samir Vincent, an Iraqi-born American who was lobbying unofficially on behalf of the Saddam Hussein regime, to try to create a program that would bypass the United Nations-approved economic sanctions of Iraq that had started in 1991. Park agreed, requesting a payment of US$10 million for his effort, which Vincent agreed to. Park served as a liaison between Vincent and then-United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whom Park was friendly with. In late 1996, partly as a result of Park's lobbying efforts, the U.N. Oil-for-Food Program began. After 1997, when Kofi Annan became the new secretary-general, the government of Iraq dropped its ties with Park; Park had received about US$2 million from them by then.
In 2005, Park's name surfaced as part of investigations into the oil-for-food scandal. In July 2006, he was convicted, in a U.S. federal court, on conspiracy charges. [2] He became the first person convicted through the oil-for-food investigation.
