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Samsung’s Lee Jae -yeon exempts a long -term accounting fraud and stock operation in the appeal court so that he can concentrate on ensuring great legal victory and improving the tip business that the group is struggling. I did.
South Korea’s largest Konglomarit’s billionaire heirs have been suffering from legal issues for 10 years since his father and former chairman Lee Kun -hee had a heart attack in 2014 and died in 2020. 。 Previous decisions by the lower court will delete many years of legal risk due to the merger in 2015, which has two Samsung unit controversy.
Prosecutors are seeking a five -year sentence in Lee, and the Samsung C & T and the Samsung Industry stock price in order to promote the merger, which is considered an important movement to solidify his control of the group Klaujell Samsung Electronics. I was accused of operating. He was also accused of adjusting $ 3.9 billion scams in a group biopharmaceutical unit and manipulating his profit.
However, the Seoul High Court refused to claim a prosecutor on Monday, stating that the merger was made for business purposes, and there was no intentional accounting fraud in Samsung biology. The final appeal of the prosecutor to the Supreme Court is considered unlikely.
Lee’s legal agent welcomed the decision. “It’s been a long time since the lawsuit and trial began,” said a lawyer Kim You Jin. “I hope that this judgment will help the defendant focus on his work.”
This ruling is an important time for Samsung. Samsung has been applied to a decrease in performance in advanced memory chips. The shares have lost more than one -third of their value in the last six months. The company acknowledges that semiconductor technical advantage is lost. A high -band width memory tip used in artificial intelligence hardware, delaying small rival SK Hinix and micron technologies. Samsung has not yet provided advanced HBM chips to the leading AI player NVIDIA.
As the commodity chip price continues to decline, operating income from October to December decreased by about 30 % compared to the previous quarter. However, SK Hynix reported record profits in the fourth quarter thanks to the large -scale exposure of the margin HBM.
Samsung and Lee’s supporters say that his legal issues are part of the weakness of the group and the failure of large -scale acquisition.
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In the last legal hearing in late November, Lee said, “Samsung is facing the current difficulties of Samsung’s future in the geopolitical risks and a growing technical challenge. He overcome it and proceeded one step forward.
Samsung has been sitting on more than 100 million dollars in the Golden Mountains since the acquisition of the US Automobile Technology Group Harman in 2016, and has been increasingly under pressure to find new growth drivers beyond chips and smartphones.
Sangin Park, a professor at the Seoul National University, said that after being purified in court, the ability to focus again with Lee’s management is unlikely to lead to a rapid turnaround.
“The court’s decision seems to have been influenced by general economic and social atmosphere,” he said. “The economy is bad, Samsung seems to be in a crisis, and concerns about US tariffs are growing. It’s time for Samsung to reconnect himself and shake his past business practices. But Lee is a law. It doesn’t seem to overcome the current crisis regardless of the problem.
