THE lawyer of a Korean businessman who was allegedly forcibly taken by Justice Department agents on Thursday slammed Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II for reversing the final and executed decision of his predecessor, now Supreme Court Associate Justice Alfredo Benjamin Caguiao.
Redentor Viaje told reporters that Aguirre had ordered the immediate arrest of Korean businessman Kang Tae Sik.
“Based on Aguirre’s resolution dated March 7, which was received only by Kang the other day, operatives of the Bureau of Immigration and Deportation and agents of the DoJ pounded on Kang’s Makati office and arrested him yesterday,” Viaje said.
He made his statement even as a Korean business group denounced the arrest of Kang who, it said, had been cleared of any links to the so-called “Korean Mafia.”
The Korean Business and Community Association was stunned by Aguirre’s decision to reverse the “final and executory decision of his predecessor, now Supreme Court Associate Justice Alfredo Benjamin Caguioa,” clearing Kang of any wrongdoing.
On Jan. 15, 2016, then Justice secretary Caguioa issued a decision granting Kang’s appeal against a resolution of the Immigration Department ordering his deportation.
Viaje quoted Caguioa as saying “it would be the height of injustice if we condone the deportation of an upright individual who has made this country his home for the last 38 years…merely on the basis of a complaint instituted by appellant’s own former lawyers.”
Aguirre, in a Feb. 23 Senate hearing on the Jee Ick Joo kidnap-slay case, testified that an anonymous Duterte administration official had told him that a certain Kang Tae Sik was the head of a Korean mafia.
But the Korean Embassy strongly denied any derogatory activities of Kang and challenged Aguirre to substantiate his remarks with concrete evidence, Viaje said.
Jee Ick Joo was a South Korean businessman who was abducted on Oct. 18, 2016 and later found dead within Camp Crame.
In October 2015, while the deportation case on Kang was still pending, immigration personnel arrested Kang.
But weeks after, Caguiao ordered the release of Kang and castigated Immigration.
