#Samsung heir Jay Y. Lee pardoned for crimes, just like his father

-

 


Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong — known in the West as Jay Y. Lee — has won a presidential pardon by South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, allowing the grandson of Samsung’s founder to resume leadership of the powerful conglomerate, Bloomberg reports. The pardon will be formalized on August 15th.

The presidential pardon is reminiscent of the two given to Lee’s father, Lee Kun-hee, who was convicted of corruption and tax evasion in 1996 and 2008.

“In a bid to overcome the economic crisis by revitalizing the economy, Samsung Electronics vice chairman Lee Jae-yong, whose suspended prison term ended recently, will be reinstated,” the South Korean government said in a statement reported by the Financial Times.

The pardon is the latest turn in a bribery scandal that dates back to 2017, when Lee was accused of bribing then-President Park Geun-hye. The Samsung heir was initially sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of corruption but served less than one year of his sentence before being released on appeal. He was subsequently reimprisoned in January 2021 before being released again in August that year on parole. In total, he served a year and a half of his 30-month sentence.

A presidential pardon is important because it opens the door to Lee retaking the helm of the tech giant founded by his grandfather, Lee Byung-Chul. Under Korean law, convicted criminals are barred from holding formal positions at a company like Samsung for five years following their conviction. Bloomberg reports that Lee has continued to receive reports from the company without having an official title.

Samsung currently doesn’t have anyone serving as its chairman after Lee Kun-hee died in October 2020. But Bloomberg notes that the pardon opens the door for Lee to return and push through major strategic decisions that are arguably necessary as the chaebol struggles with inflation, the instability caused by the war in Ukraine, supply chain problems created by China’s COVID lockdowns, and complications resulting from escalating US-China relations.

Lee’s formal return to the company is seen as a potential source of stability, not to mention a potentially politically popular one. As the Associated Press noted last year, around 5 million people in South Korea own shares in Samsung, leading to widespread support for Lee’s release from prison. But critics say that the pardon is endemic of a cozy relationship between Korea’s business and political elite that verges on the corrupt, the Financial Times notes.

“Thank you for giving me the opportunity to start anew. I am sorry for causing concern to many people,” Lee said in a statement. “I will try harder to give back to society and grow together.” But the businessman’s legal troubles are far from over given he still faces separate stock manipulation charges in relation to a merger of two Samsung subsidiaries.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#$1.5M phishing scam

-
Image
  The US Department of Justice has convicted a Nigerian national of participating in a business email compromise (BEC) scam worth $1.5 million. The Feds say Ebuka Raphael Umeti, 35, perpetuated the scam with two alleged partners in crime, using a combination of social engineering and malicious software to pull off the million-dollar BEC scheme. A BEC fraud involves phishing emails and deception to get businesses and organizations to send money or valuable data to attackers, usually over email. According to the DoJ, Umeti got involved in BEC scams as early as February 2016, when one of his alleged co-conspirators, fellow Nigerian national Franklin Ifeanyichukwu Okwonna, is said to have sent Umeti a phishing email template. The collaborators started to see success in 2018, siphoning $571,000 from a New York wholesaler and $400,000 from a Texan metal supplier. In the following years, the scammers started domain spoofing, signed up for VoIP numbers, and communicated over the gaming-focused
Read more

#Microsoft's AI boss thinks it’s perfectly OK to steal content if it's on the open web

-
Image
  Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use. When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said: I think that with respect to content that’s already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware,” if you like, that’s been the understanding. Microsoft is currently the target of multiple lawsuits alleging that it — and OpenAI — are stealing copyrighted online stories to train generative AI models, so it may not surprise you to hear a Microsoft exec defend it as perfectly legal. I just didn’t expect him to be so very publicly and obviously wrong! I am not a lawyer, but even I can tell you that the
Read more

#This man used Fake Wi-Fi Scam on Domestic Flights

-
Image
  An Australian man has been charged with running a fake Wi-Fi access point during a domestic flight with an aim to steal user credentials and data. The unnamed 42-year-old "allegedly established fake free Wi-Fi access points, which mimicked legitimate networks, to capture personal data from unsuspecting victims who mistakenly connected to them," the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said in a press release last week. The agency said the suspect was charged in May 2024 after it launched an investigation a month earlier following a report from an airline about a suspicious Wi-Fi network identified by its employees during a domestic flight. A subsequent search of his baggage on April 19 led to the seizure of a portable wireless access device, a laptop, and a mobile phone. He was arrested on May 8 after a search warrant was executed at his home. The individual is said to have staged what's called an evil twin
Read more