KEIC's Lee Wins Stone Tower Medal

Trade Day confirms executive director’s contribution to Korea’s export growth by finding ways to expand export insurance funds and coverage

Executive Director Lee Moo-young of the Korea Export Insurance Corp. (KEIC) clinched the Industrial Merit Stone Tower medal at the 46th Trade Day ceremony held on Nov. 30 at COEX in Seoul in recognition of his role in expanding the nation’s exports and its strength, the company said recently.
Lee joined the Korea Export and Import Bank three decades ago in 1979 and has worked in the area of export insurance ever since.
The executive director was head of the planning section when the company was launched in 1992, playing an important role in the creation of the KEIC by building a framework for the new company to be able to issue export insurance coverage to exporters.
Lee was credited with making a huge contribution to opening export routes to such new export market countries as Cuba, Russia, India and others, by moving speedily to issue export insurance to help Korean exporters in those countries.
The KEIC official has also been credited with doing a good job at international meetings, like OECD meetings, protecting Korea’s interests by playing a leading role in the rescheduling of Pakistan’s foreign debts, so that the KEIC was able to recover 650 billion won owed by the debt-ridden country. He has attended more than 40 international meetings.
From 1993-1998 as the deputy manager of the planning department, he studied the scale of funds maintained by export insurance firms around the world and concluded that the export insurance fund should have at least 10 percent more than the total export insurance agreements. He pleaded with government officials and related legislators to convince them of the need to expand the export insurance funds for stable export insurance coverage for several months. Due to the effort, he was instrumental for raising the export insurance fund to 873.3 billion won in 1998 from 159.3 billion won in 1994.
In August 2001, Lee, as the first risk management manager for the KEIC, he analyzed the risks by kind and country and built systematic risk management systems to enable the KEIC to provide maximum insurance coverage to exporters with limited funds.
In February 2001, when he was in charge of the KEIC’s Paris branch office, he was invited to attend the Paris club meetings to reschedule Pakistan’s national debts, which was extended for two days, non-stop. He dutifully carried out what he was told to do by the government in Seoul and still maintained cooperative relations with representatives of other countries at the meeting so that the rescheduling of the payments due to Korea was put together without a hitch.
Pakistan was scheduled to repay its debts after a three-year grace period and over 15 years at a soft interest rate of Libor+0.8 percent. Since then, Korea was put in an advantageous position in its relations with Pakistan. Korea has so far been repaid 114 billion won from Pakistan out of the 650 billion won owed.
In 2006, when he was the executive director in charge of the marketing headquarters, he was dispatched to India to see how the KEIC could help Samsung Electronics, which was building an electronics plant in that country and requested for the KEIC’s help for its exports made on credit to India. The KEIC would have run into problems if it issued export insurance coverage to the electronics company on its credit sales to Indian importers of its electronic products produced at its Indian plant. As a result of Lee’s investigation of the situation in India, the KEIC signed a fronting contract with a commercial insurance firm in India, Iffco Tokio, which helped Korean exporters to increase their exports to 1,200 importers in India by $1 billion per year since then.
While in Paris for three years from 1998, Lee attended some 40 international meetings where he protected Korea’s interests in various manners, especially, with regard to Korean exporters by preventing unfavorable agreements that would negatively impact them. nw

Exec. Director Lee Moo-young of the Korea Export Insurance Corp., who won the Industrial Merit Stone Tower medal at the 46th Trade Day ceremony on Nov. 30.