Korean tradition. Meanwhile, an auto parts maker that was connected to the
South Korean president was involved in a separate U.S. lawsuit. According
to later court testimony by Lee Hak-soo, the chairman’s former right-hand
leader, Samsung agreed behind the scenes to pay that company’s steep legal
fees.
Samsung paid the money hoping to get a presidential pardon for the
chairman, the former executive testified. In December 2008, five months
after Chairman Lee’s conviction, the president announced he was granting
special amnesty to Chairman Lee. With his exoneration, Lee was able to
remain a member of the IOC, leading a campaign to bid for the 2018
Winter Olympics, to be held in the pristine mountain county of
Pyeongchang, South Korea. The bid was successful.
“The latest pardon reconfirms a common saying in South Korea that
Samsung lies above the law and the government,” claimed economics
professor Kim Sang-jo, who would later head Korea’s government financial
watchdog, to The New York Times. “President Lee [Myung-bak] talked
about national interest, but a criminal convict traveling around the world
campaigning for South Korea’s Olympic bid will only hurt our national
interest and image.”
The political winds had shifted back in Samsung’s favor.
A day after the chairman’s pardon, on Christmas in 2009, former
Guardian correspondent Michael Breen—a noted British expert and author
on Korea and an honorary citizen of the city of Seoul—published a satire
piece in the Korea Times called “What People Got for Christmas.”
“Samsung,” he wrote, “the world’s largest conglomerate, and the rock
upon which the Korean economy rests, sent traditional year-end cards
offering best wishes for 2010 to the country’s politicians, prosecutors and
journalists, along with 50 million won [$43,000] in gift certificates.” He
went on, “Employees received two framed photographs of Lee Jae-yong,
the new Chief Operating Officer at Samsung Electronics Co.”—alluding to
the portraits of the father-and-son dictators that every North Korean must
hang in their home—“with instructions to place one in their children’s
bedroom and the other in their living rooms beside but slightly below the
one of his father, Lee Kun-hee.”
Breen and his colleagues were out for a night of karaoke, he told me,
when he got a call from the editors.
“Samsung is really upset about your column,” an editor on the other end