Lee Jae-yong is nominally “vice-chairman” of Samsung, but his father, Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, is considered to be a mere figurehead, with Lee Jae-yong as the true boss of the company.
On Friday morning, Korean police placed Lee Jae-yong in custody at the Seoul Detention Centre, acting on a Seoul Central District Court arrest warrant for charges of bribery, perjury and embezzlement. The charges are part of a larger scandal that is rocking South Korea from the top down, whose most high-profile feature so far was the 2016 impeachment of President Park Geun-hye.
The prosecutors allege that Lee Jae-yong paid $37m in bribes to cult organizations affiliated with Choi Soon-sil, who was also arrested in 2016 – and who has been characterized as a kind of Rasputin figure in the Park Geun-hye administration, carrying on the work of her father, the Shamanistic-Evangelical cult leader, Choi Tae-min.
Until today, no Samsung executive had ever been the subject of criminal charges.
