SEOUL: A South Korean appeals court on Monday suspended a jail sentence handed down to Samsung Group heir Jay Y. Lee, setting him free after a year’s detention amid a corruption scandal that brought down the former president.
Seoul High Court jailed Lee for two and a half years, reducing the original term by half, and suspended the sentence for charges including bribery and embezzlement, meaning he does not have to serve time.
Lee, 49, heir to one of the world’s biggest corporate empires, had been detained since last February.
President Park Geun-hye was dismissed in March after being impeached in a case that brought scrutiny to the nature of the ties between South Korea’s chaebols — big family-owned corporate groups — and its political leaders.
Park, who denies wrongdoing, is standing trial accused of bribery, abuse of power and coercion.
A lower court in August convicted Lee for bribing Park for help in strengthening his control of Samsung Electronics, the crown jewel of the country’s largest conglomerate and one of the world’s biggest technology companies, as well as embezzlement and other charges.
The court said Samsung’s financial support for entities backed by a friend of Park’s, Choi Soon-sil, constituted bribery, including 7.2 billion won ($6.4 million) to sponsor the equestrian career of Choi’s daughter.
Presiding senior judge Cheong Hyung-sik on Monday called the nature of Lee’s involvement in Samsung’s monetary support for Choi a “passive compliance to political power.”
Prosecutors and Samsung did not have an immediate comment. Lee, whose face was noticeably worn, did not show any emotion when the ruling was announced.
Prosecutors had sought a 12-year jail term for Lee. The ruling is expected to be appealed again to the Supreme Court, legal experts said.
With the end of his year-long detention, which according to local media he adjusted to with physical workouts and reading books, Lee could continue with his existing roles including director of Samsung Electronics.
However he has been found guilty of some lesser charges and is prohibited from traveling outside South Korea without a judge’s approval, according to law firm Cho & Partners.
The lower court ruling in August had said while Lee never asked for President Park’s help directly, the fact that a 2015 merger of two Samsung affiliates did help cement Lee’s control over Samsung Electronics implied he was asking for the president’s help to strengthen his control of the firm.
His lawyers had strongly challenged this logic and said that the merger was done for business reasons.
Some criminal lawyers had expected Lee to be found innocent of most of the charges, as much of the evidence at the trial has been circumstantial.
But although he was set free from detention by the appeals court, the stigma may stick, lawyers say.
“Public opinion will get riled up and people will keep thinking there was some quid pro quo between Samsung’s Lee and the president,” Lee Jung-jae, a lawyer at law firm Jung said.
Samsung scion walks free as South Korean appeals court suspends jail term
Samsung scion walks free as South Korean appeals court suspends jail term
As world fractures, experts weigh in on the politics of AI at WGS
- e& group CEO Hatem Dowidar said there was increasing pressure to choose between the Chinese and US ecosystems
DUBAI: Across three days of rigorous debate at the World Government Summit in Dubai, experts from some of the world’s largest tech and telecommunication companies debated what the future political landscape of artificial intelligence development would be.
Speaking at the summit on Thursday, e& group CEO Hatem Dowidar said there was increasing pressure to choose between the Chinese and US ecosystems, which could have impacts on the sovereign capabilities of countries, like Gulf Cooperation Council member states, which thus far have stayed in the middle.
“I think the fracture and the pressure today is if you use this technology, you cannot use the other. You must separate them completely and this is something that never happened before,” Dowidar said.
He warned that whilst people around the world currently have access to both the leading large language models in the US and China, ChatGPT and Deepseek, this would not always be the case, and middle powers would need to develop their own capability to maintain their sovereignty.
“Europe is trying to find its own way as well, because Europe — having been caught now in the middle — they don’t have platforms, they don’t have the data center capability,” he said.
“So now, Europe is focusing a lot on building sovereign capability, sovereign data centers to run AI applications within Europe.”
Dowidar said the GCC had been ahead of the curve in this regard, having worked out early on that sovereign capability would be necessary in the new multipolar world and subsequently investing heavily in local infrastructure and capability.
“We were lucky here in the region that already — I would say a couple of years ago —we have kind of ironed out how this works,” he said.
“I think that everyone will try to see how they can either utilize the global platforms in a sovereign manner, or they end up trying to push to develop their own platforms.”
This sentiment was echoed by Chamath Palihapitiya, the founder and managing partner of Social Capital, who said that China’s dedication to open-source models — whose code is released under a license granting users rights to view, study, modify, and redistribute it freely — could make Chinese AI more popular in the long run for nations looking to keep some level of sovereignty.
“I do think that there are a handful of American open-source models that are quite good. I think Nvidia’s models are excellent. But in fairness, the Chinese open-source models are just superb,” he told the summit on Wednesday.
“It’s going to be important for every country to make their own decisions about their own sovereignty, and in that realm, I think the open-source models provide the clearest path, because it just gives you total transparency to what’s happening underneath the hood.”
This was reiterated by Joseph Tsai, the chairman and co-founder of Alibaba Group, who said Chinese open-source systems would be favored by middle powers — but warned they had yet to find a way to be economically self-sufficient.
“Because countries care about the sovereignty aspect and care about their data privacy, you can take an open-source model and deploy it on your own infrastructure … giving you ownership and control” he said.
“But it remains to be seen how economically all the model companies are going to make it sort of sustainable with an open-source approach … This is the biggest challenge for the Chinese firms.”
