Back in 2017, Lee Jae-yong, the vice chairman of Samsung and would-be heir of the tech empire at the time, was found guilty in a bribery and embezzlement scandal, and was sentenced to 5 years in prison.
Lee was accused of wiring the equivalent of almost $40 million from Samsung subsidiaries to two foundations set up by a confidante of impeached president of South Korea Park Geun-hye. The money was allegedly paid out to win favor from the country’s state pension fund, which supported a merger between two Samsung affiliates in 2015.
With Lee Jae-yong in jail, what would the impact on Samsung be?
That’s right, the new verdict saw deliberations where “Lee, 52, was accused of offering horses and other payments to a friend of the former president to win support for his formal succession at the corporation,” and has actually already been upheld by the Supreme Court, so some prison time for Lee seems inevitable now.
If Lee Jae-yong was only a figure head skating on his father’s money, the impact on those future plans of Samsung wouldn’t be very noticeable, but he was actually the person with the vision to restructure and provide the long-term strategic planning that was behind those multibillion moves of the company in the first place. If and how him going to prison for a prolonged sentence will impact Samsung’s future operations remains to be seen, but we hope that the exciting future plans for new technologies remain intact, at least in the next few Galaxy iterations.
Needless to say, Mr Lee is unlikely to be held until it’s time for the Galaxy S40 but he could very well serve quite a long sentence to set an example nonetheless, so hopefully Samsung has contigency plans for whatever is in its pipeline for that period.
