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A courtroom in South Korea has convicted opposition chief Lee Jae-myung for violating election regulation, casting uncertainty over the prospects of him working for president in subsequent yr’s election.
The Seoul Central District Courtroom discovered the Democratic Occasion chief responsible of creating a false declare a few land growth venture in 2021 whereas campaigning for presidency.
The courtroom handed him a jail time period of a yr, suspended for 2 years.
Lee, nevertheless, mentioned he would enchantment the ruling in the next courtroom. “It’s a conclusion that I can not settle for,” Lee instructed reporters as he left the courtroom.
“There are nonetheless two extra courts left in the true world, and the courts of public opinion and historical past are everlasting,” he mentioned, apparently referring to plans to take the case to the Supreme Courtroom.
Lee is a firebrand liberal who misplaced the 2022 election to conservative president Yoon Suk Yeol by a skinny margin.
He turned a high contender to unseat Mr Yoon, whose approval scores have plummeted to record-low ranges as he grapples together with his personal political scandal.
Lee’s probabilities elevated after a landslide victory in parliamentary elections in April and received sufficient seats within the parliament to strain the conservative ruling Folks Energy Occasion.
Thought of one of the polarising figures in South Korean politics, Lee, a former youngster manufacturing unit employee who endured an industrial accident after dropping out of faculty, has typically highlighted his rags-to-riches journey to political stardom.
Nonetheless, his profession has been overshadowed by scandals and allegations of hyperlinks to organised crime.
In January, Lee survived a knife assault, sustaining a neck harm that required surgical procedure.
In 2022, prosecutors indicted Lee on expenses of creating false claims about two contentious growth initiatives in Seongnam, the place he served as mayor from 2010 to 2018, throughout his marketing campaign because the Democratic Occasion’s presidential candidate.
On 25 November, the identical courtroom will rule on one other case towards Lee through which he’s accused of suborning perjury by allegedly pressuring a Seongnam metropolis worker to offer false testimony in a unique courtroom case in 2019.
The testimony was meant to downplay his 2003 conviction that, when as a lawyer, he had helped a TV journalist impersonate a prosecutor to safe an interview with then-Seongnam Mayor Kim Byung-ryang over suspected corruption in 2002.
Lee has denied any wrongdoing and accused the federal government of Mr Yoon, a prosecutor-turned-president, of pursuing a political vendetta.
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