Translated material
A court in Seoul jailed three Samsung executives accused of destroying evidence.
The Seoul Central District Court on December 9 sentenced three Samsung Electronics executives to prison terms accused of breaking up cliques in an accounting fraud case at subsidiary Samsung BioLogics.
According to the Yonhap agency, the vice president of Samsung Electronics, who was responsible for the company's funds, was sentenced to two years in prison, and the two heads of the Samsung task force will spend a year and a half in prison. At the same time, the prosecutor's office demanded that the top managers be sentenced to four and three and a half years in prison.
According to investigators, the convicted top managers ordered subordinates to falsify internal documents and themselves took part in this activity since May last year, when an investigation into accounting fraud at Samsung BioLogics became inevitable.
South Korean prosecutors and financial regulators suspect drugmaker Samsung BioLogics inflated its value by about $3.8 billion in 2015 after changing the way it values its stake in Samsung Bioepis, a joint venture with U.S. company Biogen. After changing its methodology, Samsung BioLogics became profitable.
Today's court decision was the first and affected only the destruction and concealment of evidence in the case. Investigators continue to look into the underlying case of report fraud.