SEOUL: South Korea's first lady is facing renewed allegations of plagiarism in her Ph.D. dissertation and other published papers.
The allegations against Kim Keon-hee have been reignited by a group of professors, although last month, she was cleared of it after an eight-month probe by Kookmin University.
According to a Korea Times report, the university had also stated that the statute of limitations of five years for verifying the papers had expired.
The renewed allegations comes from a group of 16 professors from 14 academic associations, called the Pan-academic National Verification Group for the Verification of Suspicions of Plagiarism of First Lady Kim Keon-hee.
They revealed their findings verifying Kim's academic misconduct at the Press Centre in the capital Seoul on Tuesday, claiming that all of Kim's academic works were "indisputably entangled with plagiarism," and that they violated basic academic standards.
According to their findings, a total of 220 out of the 860 sentences in Kim's Ph.D. dissertation were copied and pasted without citing the original sources.
She produced her dissertation when she attended Kookmin University's Graduate School of Techno Design in 2008
The plagiarised sentences allegedly also include 40 sentences from a research paper by Gu Yeon-sang, a professor of general education at Sookmyung Women's University and 24 sentences from newspaper articles.
There are also allegedly 146 sentences from "Happy Campus," an online dissertation platform popular among university students, where reports and essays are sold at a price of around 500 won (US$0.36) each.
The group also alleged that some of Kim's other academic papers directly quoted other scholars' theses, as well as websites and blogs of renowned fortune tellers and saju readers, without citing the original sources.
Saju is a form of traditional fortune-telling based on a person's birth year, month, date and time.
Following the revelation by the professors, the Kookmin University's alumni association has called upon the university to respond to the findings and reveal the details of its eight-month probe.
On Aug 1, Kookmin University had said it did not find any serious violations of the academic code of conduct or plagiarism from probe into Kim's Ph.D. dissertation and other academic publications.
The university said Kim's papers contained some "shortcomings" and were "inappropriate according to the current standards," but that these "insufficiencies" does not constitute academic misconduct.
It further said that checks showed that her works only scored between seven to 17 per cent on the plagiarism index in a plagiarism checker programme.
The Korea Times reports that the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) has announced that it will propose a bill called the Kim Keon-hee Special Prosecutor Law that will allow the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the allegations against Kim.
DPK's representative Park Hong-geun said the party will propose the bill to enable the prosecution to form a special team to investigate the multiple allegations against the first lady, including academic plagiarism, academic fraud, stock price manipulation and bribery.
During the confirmation hearing of Prosecutor General nominee Lee One-seok on Monday, DPK lawmakers questioned him on why they were hesitant to investigate the allegations against Kim.
Lee then requested the parliament to pass a bill to guarantee that the prosecutor general has the right to lead the case.
The Korea Times also said that DPK members of the Education Committee have demanded that the first lady apologise to the people as well as submit to an investigation in order to be held accountable for her alleged misconduct.
The party said it was also considering filing a complaint against Kookmin University.
Meanwhile, the ruling People Power Party (PPP) questioned the credibility of the Pan-academic National Verification Group's findings and claimed that the group supports the DPK and has political intentions.
"As the group's name may suggest, the verification group pretends to make a scholastic presentation on behalf of the academic community … However, the bottom line is that it is merely a political organisation that supports DPK leader Lee Jae-myung," PPP spokesperson Rep. Park Jung-ha said.
Park said that some of the 14 academic associations that were part of the organisation had openly supported Lee during the presidential campaign earlier in March and called on them to "stop deceiving people under the pretext of academic investigation."