According to Reuters reported on the 18th, a South Korean court ruled on Tuesday that Lee Sang-hoon, chairman of Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, was sentenced to a year and a half in prison for sabotaging union activities.
Earlier, Lee Sang-hoon and 25 other defendants were charged with sabotaging union activities of workers at Samsung Electronics Subcontractor.
The Seoul Central District Court ruled that when Samsung Electronics Services held a union event in 2013, the elite strategy office once opened by Samsung Group formulated and implemented measures to hinder the union's operations, and the office is now closed.
At the same time, Samsung executives and employees were involved in investigating the sensitive information of union members to varying degrees to persuade them to leave the union, bring down the union's active subcontracting companies, and delay negotiations between labor and management.
Last week, Kang Kyung-hoon, a vice president of Samsung Electronics, was sentenced to 16 months in prison for sabotage of union activities at its now-defunct subsidiary, Samsung Everland. Everland is an amusement park operator and part of Samsung C&T.
Samsung Electronics and Samsung C&T said: "We humbly acknowledge that the company's past understanding and perception of unions has not met society's expectations."
Park Sang-in, a professor at Seoul National University, said the verdict was "another signal of changes in The South Korean judicial system, which previously gave convicted businessmen lighter sentences."
(Editor: ZLQ)