Cheong Wa Dae on Thursday continued to keep silent over the series of high-profile corruption charges involving some of the closest confidants of President Park Geun-hye.

The problematic figure this time was An Chong-bum, the senior presidential secretary for policy coordination, who has been named as the alleged person in charge of some dubious political fundraising.

“Slandering remarks and disclosure of unidentified facts will jolt our society and eventually increase chaos,” Park said in a meeting with senior secretaries, urging for unity among people and political circles.

Her remarks was taken as a counterattack against the opposition camp’s burgeoning aggression that the president allegedly raised illegitimate funds through the Mir Foundation and K-Sports Foundation via a close associate. Lawmakers of The Minjoo Party of Korea and the People’s Party suggested that An was the invisible hand in the process, with some alluding that he was acting as proxy for the president herself.

As for an exclusive report by Hankyoreh, which claimed that An played a key role in the recent conflict between the Blue House and special inspector Lee Seok-su, the presidential office flatly denied this.

“(Cheong Wa Dae) does not have access to the details of the special inspector’s probe,” presidential spokesperson Jung Youn-kuk told reporters.

The reason that inspector Lee stood at odds with the presidential office and ended up resigning from his post, according to the daily, was because he touched upon An’s alleged connection to the disputed fund-raising of the two foundations.

The newspaper also quoted an anonymous member of Lee’s probe team, who claimed that these two conglomerate-funded foundations were a vulnerable point for Park and her close aides.

The source was quoted as saying that when Cheong Wa Dae accused Lee of disrupting national order upon Lee’s alleged information leak to the press, the presidential office was responding not just in regard to Woo’s case, but potentially trying to keep the target from moving onto An.

“(The president) seems to have been perplexed that the two ‘inviolable’ foundations should become the target of probe.”

The two organizations rose to the center of political debate this week, following the opposition parties’ argument that they raised massive funds from conglomerates by pulling strings in the government through a close associate of Park.

The two foundations reportedly not only received the government’s approval for establishment within a single day, but also raised 48.6 billion won ($44 million) and 28.8 billion won in funds, respectively, from leading conglomerates.

Meanwhile, former Deputy Prime Minister and the ruling Saenuri Party senior lawmaker Choi Kyung-hwan also came under fire for allegedly exerting pressure on the hiring process of a state-run corporation.

Park Cheol-gyu, the former director of the Small Business Corp. who is currently in trial for business obstruction charges, claimed that he had received direct orders last year from Choi to hire a person who used to work as an intern in Choi’s office.

The lawmaker, who is also a central figure in the party’s pro-presidential clique, has so far refrained from offering a statement on the issue.

By Bae Hyun-jung (tellme@heraldcorp.com)