Former South Korean president Lee Myung-bak has been jailed for 15 years for corruption.<\/p>\n
Lee was sentenced in a Seoul court on Friday on charges of bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power, and ordered to pay a 13 billion won ($11.5m; \u00a38.8m) fine.<\/p>\n
The former president claims the charges are politically motivated.<\/p>\n
He becomes the fourth South Korean former leader to be jailed, following his successor’s imprisonment in April.<\/p>\n
Park Geun-hye was sentenced to 33 years in jail\u00a0after being found guilty of abuse of power and coercion.<\/p>\n
Lee was not present at the sentencing, blaming poor health.<\/p>\n
The judge at Seoul Central District Court said “heavy punishment for the accused is inevitable” because of the serious nature of the crimes.<\/p>\n
The court found the former leader accepted billions of won from major electronics firm Samsung in return for pardoning its chairman, Lee Kun-hee. The company denies having given the former president the money.<\/p>\n
Links between political leaders and large family-owned conglomerates known as chaebols have often come under scrutiny, or been the focus of criminal allegations.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former South Korean president Lee Myung-bak has been jailed for 15 years for corruption. Lee was sentenced in a Seoul court on Friday on charges of bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power, and ordered to pay a 13 billion won ($11.5m; \u00a38.8m) fine. The former president claims the charges are politically motivated. He becomes the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4641,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4639"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4644,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4639\/revisions\/4644"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}