Samsung’s Executive Chairman Jay Y. Lee has been cleared of criminal charges by South Korea’s second highest court, Bloomberg reports. Earlier on Monday, the Seoul High Court upheld a previous decision to dismiss charges against Lee for stock manipulation and accounting fraud during the 2015 merger. This decision will allow Lee to focus on Samsung‘s mobile and chip businesses, which have seen their profits decline over the past few years. Lee has consistently denied committing any crimes.
The prosecution can still appeal to the Supreme Court of Korea, but it is unlikely to succeed as no new arguments can be presented, experts say. “The investigation and trial of this case has taken a very long time,” Samsung’s lawyer Kim Yoo-jin said in a statement. “We hope that with this verdict, the defendants will be able to focus on their work.”
Back in 2017, prosecutors accused Lee of manipulating the share price of two Samsung subsidiaries to smooth the way for a merger that allowed him to consolidate his power. However, in early 2024, the court ruled that prosecutors had failed to prove this. “It is difficult to say that Lee Jae-yong [aka J.Y. Lee]… was the initiator of the merger, and that the merger was done only for the sake of Lee’s succession,” the judge said in his ruling.
At the time, the decision was welcomed by business groups, but not everyone in the country agreed. “The decision will free Li from legal risks, but I am speechless in terms of the country’s economic justice,” Park Ju-gun, chairman of the Leaders Index corporate think tank, told The Financial Times in February 2024. “This is completely contrary to all previous court rulings on the merger.”
Li was originally sentenced to five years in prison in 2017 after being found guilty of bribing public officials in connection with the same merger, but the Supreme Court overturned the decision and ordered a retrial. In early 2021, Lee was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and released on parole six months later (former Korean President Park Geun-hye was also imprisoned for her role in the same case). In 2022, Lee was pardoned by South Korean President Yun Seok-ol, who himself had recently been impeached and charged with sedition for attempting to impose martial law.
