It turns out that the 43-yeld-old son of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, seen as one of the strongest potential presidential candidates, has been working at SKTelecom’s New York Office. According to local media outlets, Fact Oll and Shin DongA, his son has been working at the office since January 2011.
His annual salary hovered around 150,000 dollars and SK Telecom (SKT) also served as a H1B Visa sponsor for his son. He is also known to have got into the company through a special recruitment program. The New York office is reportedly staffed with 3-4 employees.
The problem is that SKT already has its US subsidiary in San Francisco, so many say it’s unusual for SKT’s Seoul headquarters to separately open a New York office.
Amongst S. Korea’s three major telecom operators, SKT is the only operator to have both a US subsidiary and a separate office. Sales are rarely generated from the New York Office. According to SKT, the New York Office is tasked with monitoring trends in the US IT industry.
In June 2011, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was unanimously re-elected to serve a second five-year term, only 5 months after his son landed a job at the New York Office. His son had worked for a foreign bank until the end of 2010. Thanks to SKT’s special recruitment program, his son could reunite with his family in New York.
From the beginning of 2011, the media predicted that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would clinch a second term. Once Ban Ki-Moon won his second term as secretary-general, the media started to describe him as the odds-on favourite to be the next president of South Korea.
Therefore, business circles suspect that SKT, which made a hefty donation to the Mir Foundation allegedly linked to President Park Geun-hye, tried to curry favor with a potential future president. As regards Ban’s son landing a job at the New York Office, SKT said, “His son graduated from Seoul National University and got an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and his previous work experience is peachy-keen.“
“We made the hiring decision based on multiple referrals, but we cannot disclose who wrote reference letters for him,” SKT said.