South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung indicted over funds transfer to North Korea

SEOUL – South Korea’s main opposition leader was indicted on June 12 on bribery charges in an alleged scheme to use an underwear maker to transfer funds to North Korea and facilitate a visit to Pyongyang when he was a provincial governor, news reports said.

Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung’s deputy Lee Hwa-young, when the former was Gyeonggi province’s governor, had earlier on June 7 been found guilty of bribery and transferring illegal funds in a conspiracy involving the Ssangbangwool Group to send US$8 million (S$10.8 million) to North Korea.

Ssangbangwool is a business group that began as an underwear maker and later expanded to other businesses.

Calls to the public affairs office at the Suwon District Prosecutors’ Office went unanswered.

Democratic Party’s Lee has denied any involvement in or knowledge of the scheme, which dates to 2019 and 2020, and was aimed at promoting a commercial project with North Korea and a visit by Lee to Pyongyang, which would have burnished his status as a rising political figure.

“I am not that foolish,” he said in 2023, calling the charges against him “fiction” as a court denied a warrant for his arrest.

After the indictment on June 12, he said: “The prosecutors’ creativity is getting worse.”

He was the Democratic Party’s candidate for president in 2022, and

narrowly lost to Mr Yoon Suk-yeol,

a career prosecutor. Lee is considered a major contender for the next presidential election in 2027.

He is on a separate trial on corruption charges stemming from his term as mayor of a city near Seoul.

The first summit between North Korea and South Korea in 2000, which was credited with starting a period of engagement, was tarnished after South Korean government officials were convicted of transferring funds to Pyongyang through the Hyundai Group, which subsequently had nearly exclusive rights to major business ventures in the North. REUTERS