Assembly passes dozens of core bills

The National Assembly on Monday passed a series of long-awaited bills aiming to support economic growth, silencing critics who charged partisan wrangling had paralyzed lawmaking in the legislature.

But lawmakers failed to enact other much-touted draft bills, including a landmark anticorruption bill targeting influence peddling among public officials.

Lawmakers voted on two bills aiming to kick life into the cruise industry and investments into real estate development of coastal areas.

A bill sponsored by the ruling Saenuri Party and the Park Geun-hye administration will provide government support to develop the domestic cruise industry. It had been pending in the Assembly since July 2013.

The bill will allow the central and local governments to lower related taxes, and legalize gambling on cruise ships weighing more than 20,000 tons.

Legislators passed the Mariana Bay Infrastructure Vitalization Act, submitted to the National Assembly in 2012 by the government, which will lower real estate and investment taxes on bay development projects.

The two bills were stalled due to protests by the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy, which had charged that they would mostly benefit a few rich investors. The NPAD was especially suspicious of the cruise industry bill as it legalized large-scale casinos.

Insiders said the main opposition, however, let the bills pass as the governing party had yielded to the opposition’s demands on other bills. One of those bills authorized damages payment by the government to families of victims killed in the Sewol ferry accident last April.

The 6,800-ton Sewol’s sinking in the West Sea left more than 300 dead, most of them schoolchildren. Prosecutors blamed marine industry regulators for condoning safety violations in the months leading up to the disaster.

Local media and government critics also charged the Coast Guard of having botched the rescue operations.

The opposition parties had consistently demanded that the government pay damages to the victims for the faults. The governing party had been ambivalent about the suggested payments, as it appeared to link President Park, the government’s top executive, to the accident.

But the bill passed Monday after the NPAD agreed to take out the word “compensation” from the bill in previous negotiations. Compensation legally implies that a specific entity holds responsibility for the reason for making payments to victims.

Lawmakers also authorized a special parliamentary panel to investigate accusations that the Lee Myung-bak administration had misspent millions of won in public money, under the former president’s “resource diplomacy” policy.

Lawmakers, though, failed to pass the so-called Kim Young-ran bill.

The KYR bill, named after its initial proposer, the former chief of the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission, proposes to penalize all public officials who receive more than 1 million won ($920) or an equivalent amount in products or services from outside interest groups.

By Jeong Hunny ()