The heir of the giant south Korean company Samsung Lee Jae-yong has escaped this Monday to his detention requested by the prosecutor in the investigation on the controversial merger of two subsidiaries of the group.

read also : South Korea: a court called upon to adjudicate on the committal of the heir of Samsung

at the end of a nine-hour hearing, a court in Seoul has rejected the request of the prosecutor, holding that there was no adequate reason for his arrest, reported the news agency south Korean Yonhap. Dressed in a dark suit, a mask on the face due to the coronavirus, the heir of the largest conglomerate in south korea had not responded to questions from journalists on his arrival at the court.

controversial Merger

The prosecutor’s office in Seoul announced Thursday, have required a warrant for the arrest of Lee Jae-yong, including suspected price manipulation in the controversial merger of two units of Samsung, Cheil Industries, and C&T, in 2015. This operation, crucial to the succession at the head of the group, had been denounced by some shareholders, who felt that C&T had been deliberately under-evaluated. But the national Fund of pensions, a significant shareholder of Samsung under the supervision of the ministry of social Affairs, supported.

grandson of the founder of Samsung, Lee Jae-Yong became the boss of the de-facto of the group after the heart attack of his father in 2014. He was the majority shareholder of Cheil Industries, and the assailants of the merger say that the heir of Samsung was looking to cheapen artificially the price of C&T in order to give a more substantial participation in the new entity born from the merger of the two, and that was an important component of the structure of the group. Which would have allowed it to consolidate its grip on the conglomerate. In a press release, the group has deemed “unfounded” suspicions of manipulation of prices, adding that Lee Jae-Yongn’had taken part in “any unlawful activity”.

precedents with justice

Vice-president of Samsung Electronics, Lee Jae-yong is also a retrial on corruption in the resounding scandal, which had led to the impeachment and condemnation of the ex-president of south korea Park Geun-hye. In early may, he had presented his excuses for the scandals and affairs that have stifled the world’s leading manufacturer of smartphones.

The group was founded in 1938 by the grandfather of Lee Jae-yong, who has promised that he would be the last in the line of family succession. He had been sentenced in 2017, to five years in prison as part of the corruption scandal that had brought Park Geun-hye. The leader of the 51-year-old was released a year later. But his case is currently the subject of a new trial. The turnover of the Samsung group alone accounts for one-fifth of the GDP of South Korea, the 12th economy in the world, where its political and economic weight is considerable.

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