Every Street Is Paved with Gold: The Real Road to Success by Kim Woo-choong

After five years and eight months in exile as a laxly pursued fugitive, Kim Woo-choong returned to the motherland in June to face charges of political payoffs, illegal loans and accounting fraud. There is one charge that is missing from the list, and that is being a literary fraud.

In 1989, Kim penned a book in Korean called The World Is Big and There's Lots to Do. It was required reading for all employees of the Daewoo empire. It was the company Koran, the chaebol bible, and in 1992 it was translated into English and published as, Every Street is Paved with Gold: The Real Road to Success.

It's one of the books that never should have been written and should be tossed on a shelf with such titles as On Humanity and Human Rights by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, Corporate Transparency Ethics by former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay and The Guide to Marital Fidelity by former US president Bill Clinton.

On July 1, South Korean prosecutors indicted Kim for accounting fraud, obtaining illegal bank loans and laundering $25 billion through a secret British front corporation. Early in his book, Kim writes, "Business is more than making money; losing less money is sometimes important, too." He also wrote, "In business, you can't just add one and one and get two. You have to see one turning into 10, and 10 turning into 50. That's the way to count in business." He is believed to be responsible for the largest accounting fraud in history, bigger than Enron and WorldCom. When Daewoo tanked with $80 billion in debt, Kim fled the country.

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Copyright © James Card.