Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
It was recently revealed that YG and his brother Yang Min Suk have a company that own a club called Love Signal that is suspected of tax evasion. Well now Kuki News did further digging and found five other clubs connected to YG who were using similar tactics, with three of them being under the same company the brothers own.
In addition to Love Signal, the club that Seungri had promoted, Corporation A also apparently owns 3 other clubs including Gabbia, Moon Night and Samgeori Byulbam. In fact, the building of Gabbia and Samgeori Byulbam is owned by Yang Hyun Suk himself. It turns out that all three of these clubs were registered under “general restaurant” as was the case for Love Signal. Mapo-gu has enacted an ordinance that allows general restaurants to allow customers to dance at their seats and it looks like Yang Hyun Suk was utilizing this ordinance for all of his clubs.
So again, basically the problem is that none of these places should be able to be registered as general restaurants.
Kuki News claims that Moon Night goes against the regulations as there is a platform that looks like a stage as well as a DJ booth. Samgeori Byulbam also had a structure that could be seen as a stage. Gabbia did not have a stage, but there was a space for customers to dance. Even though there is no stage, this could be a violation of the ordinance, which states that customers must only dance at their seats.
Hard to argue with the pictures, and they were kind of hiding in plain sight anyway.
Furthermore, YG’s older clubs NB1 and NB2 were reportedly previously found in violation already and were put on probation for ordinance violation, as clubs aren’t actually allowed in the area to begin with.
The clubs that are referred to as NB1 and NB2 (Noise Basement) were the most problematic. According to Kuki News, there was a stage as well as space for DJs to play music on the second floor of the club. Customers generally danced on the stage surrounding this space or next to the stage. It was a violation of the ordinance. The managers of NB have been put on probation and fined even before Mapo-gu’s “general restaurant” ordinance for being an unauthorized adult entertainment establishment. Because the Hongdae area is a residential area, adult entertainment establishments are not allowed in the first place. However, the clubs such as NB have opened after reporting the business as a “general restaurant”.
So that’s less about tax evasion and more that they shouldn’t exist.
Meanwhile, authorities continue to be evasive of criticism.
An affiliate of the Mapo-gu Office explained that administrative measure would have been taken if violations were discovered during the inspection of general restaurants but that if there were no people dancing on the stage at the time of the inspection, it was difficult to clamp down on it. Moreover, the person said, “I have nothing to say about that,” and hung up when asked about the violations of the clubs in question.
They essentially don’t care, which kinda makes sense since they allowed the ordinance that has paved the way for all this skirting of proper taxes to begin with.
Again, on its own, I don’t think this is all that surprising. Businesses doing shady shit like this, especially when it comes to clubs, is probably common (though still wrong). But it’s certainly noteworthy considering everything else that’s going on right now as fitting with a pattern, and it’s hard to not feel like this is just the surface as investigations into clubs and police continue on.
