“We cannot give him immunity only due to the fact that he was not aware of the peripheral areas.” With those words, according to Yonhap news agency, a Seoul judge rejected Lee Sang-hoon’s argument that he knew little about the plan to break up unions at Samsung. The court sentenced the chairman of the Samsung Electronics board to 18 months in prison on Tuesday.
Lee and about 25 other defendants were convicted of violating labour union-related laws. How much each was found to have done varied from person to person.
Seoul Central District Court said the plans to halt union activity were devised by executives in Samsung’s elite strategy group, which no longer exists. The case on Tuesday dealt mostly with efforts to undermine unions at the customer service unit, where Lee was chief financial officer at the time.
Prosecutors laid out several tactics. Samsung closed sub-contracted firms that had active unions. Defendants dug up sensitive information about union members to talk them into leaving. They also dragged out negotiations between the unions and management. The court found “countless documents” describing ways to weaken unions, which the strategy group had sent out to affiliates.
Samsung had not commented on the ruling.
A week earlier, Samsung Electronics Vice-President Kang Kyung-hoon was sentenced to 16 months in prison on union-busting charges.
Park Sang-in, a professor at Seoul National University, told Reuters that Tuesday’s ruling was “a further signal of change for the South Korean judicial system, which previously gave lenient sentences to convicted businessmen.”
