Gwangju City Councilor Lee Gwisun: "City Education Office Suffers Hundreds of Millions Loss in Retirement Pension Fund Investment"

Lee Gwi-soon, a member of the Gwangju Metropolitan Council (Democratic Party, Gwangsan-gu 4), claimed on the 6th during the administrative audit of the Gwangju Metropolitan Office of Education that “the Gwangju Metropolitan Office of Education invested the retirement pension of educational public employees in a principal-guarantee-not-guaranteed fund and suffered losses amounting to several hundred million won.”

According to the regulations on the designation of financial institutions by city and provincial offices of education, it is specified that depositing certain funds into financial products that do not guarantee the principal should be avoided.

He continued, “The retirement pension of educational public employees has been managed with safety as the top priority, but the process of suddenly changing to a principal-guarantee-not-guaranteed fund due to the reason of improving profitability is suspicious,” and pointed out, “There is a serious procedural issue whether it is possible to apply for the accumulation of a large sum of 5.6 billion won by the head of the relevant department without obtaining approval from the superintendent of education, who is the final approver, when changing the retirement pension accumulation method to a fund.”

He added, “Although many officials in the Office of Education openly know about this, no one has raised any issues or made active efforts to prevent recurrence, which raises doubts about whether the Office of Education truly has a will for integrity,” and said, “Anyone should strictly investigate the suspicious parts, and if necessary, consider filing charges.”

In response, Park Cheol-shin, Director of Policy at the Gwangju Metropolitan Office of Education, said, “This happened while trying to increase profits, and in 2022, the retirement fund law was amended to allow the operation of a fund management committee for the efficiency of fund management,” and added, “For dividend products that cause losses, we will manage and deposit the funds rationally through the committee.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.