As soon as he arrived at Kangwon Land last November, President Ham Seung-huie embarked on a mission to root out criminal activities at the only resort with a casino in Korea.
So far, six employees have been turned over to the prosecution for alleged criminal activities under the new CEO’s drive to put an end to any wrong doings at the casino and resort.
The drive is only 100 days old, and there is still work to be done.
It’s the only casino in the country that permits locals to spend their money at gambling tables along with foreign visitors. Only foreigners are permitted to gamble in Korea’s other casinos.
Ham could have let the alleged offenders off the hook by accepting letters of resignation, but instead he turned them over to law enforcement authorities.
The former prosecutor made a name for himself by taking on organized criminal gangs during his time as a prosecutor. He also served a term as a legislator before he took over the top management of the casino and resort as CEO.
The resort is a huge enterprise with an annual turnover amounting to 1.5 trillion won and 400 billion won in net profit, employing some 5,000 people.
It is a daunting job, but CEO Ham simplified his role as two-fold: the first one being to clean up irregular activities and the other being to boost the profit to help the economy of the nearby areas, which includes many closed coal mines, putting many residents in the area out of a job.
In order to achieve the first job, he set out to clean up past operations of the resort, reform personnel policies, and to reform public bidding systems.
Ham said the irregularities at the resort included employees pocketing illegal handouts and fraudulent sales. He required that every employee report his or her involvement with irregularities in the past and return the money they got to the company voluntarily. He also warned that any employees who got a soft punishment for previous irregular acts would be reinvestigated so they will get the appropriate punishment. This explains why those six employees were turned over to the prosecution so quickly.
He also made personnel policies stricter than before. Eight out of nine new directors that he appointed were publicly hired through an open test. He said around 1,500 answered an ad for eight directors to be hired.
Ham said those eight directors included the holder of a doctorate from a university abroad, a vice president of a large corporation, an intelligence officer, an ex-army general, a former director of a large construction company, and all of them were put in charge of managing the resort and casino and construction projects in the resort complex.
The new CEO has also been working hard to help the economy of nearby towns by finding new growth engines for Kangwon Land. One of the projects that the resort has been pushing is to make it a family vacation spot, like Las Vegas in the U.S., where families visit to enjoy various entertainment facilities, such as golf course and condos. Kangwon Land has all of the facilities that Las Vegas and Singapore, another benchmark, have. Family tourists can enjoy hiking during the day and try their luck at the casino with all kinds of gambling facilities including slot machines, roulette and black jack, among others.
Ham is in the process of building a mountain track course by reengineering roads that the miners used to use. The project is named “Woontan Road Project.” The roads were built with shovels and pickaxes during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945) to transport coal to Jeongsun Rail Station in Jeongsun, Gangwon Province.
The CEO is also opposed to a 10 percent leisure tax on Kangwon Land by the government.
Kangwon Land is expected to report third quarter sales of 435.2 billion won, a 35.9 percent increase, and operating profit of 157.7 billion won.
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