Lee Hwa-young’s side seeks retrial in North Korea remittance case while he serves a prison sentence: “New evidence to prove innocence”

[Financial News] Lee Hwa-young’s side filed a petition for a retrial with the court on the 3rd. Lee, a former vice governor for peace of Gyeonggi Province, is serving a prison sentence of seven years and eight months, finalized after he was implicated in the “Ssangbangwool remittance to North Korea” case. His side says it has secured new evidence, including materials from the National Intelligence Service (NIS), that could undermine the prosecution’s coercive and pressuring investigation and the core reasoning behind the existing guilty verdict.
Lee’s defense team (attorneys O Gi-du, Ryu Jae-yul, Kim Hyeon-cheol and Lee Deok-u) filed the retrial petition at 9 a.m. that day at the general civil affairs office of the Suwon High Court, then held a press conference to explain the grounds for the petition and its key issues. The petition initially targets the part of the final judgment concerning the charge of violating the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act.
The defense team argued that the two key grounds on which the final judgment found Lee guilty—“the purpose of the remittance to North Korea” and “the credibility of accomplices’ statements”—could not stand in light of newly discovered objective evidence.
Attorney Ryu Jae-yul said, “The ruling presumed that Ssangbangwool would have found it difficult to consider a business venture in North Korea without a request from Lee, and treated it as normal business activity, but the objective facts are the exact opposite.” He said Ssangbangwool had been driving up its share price as a stock expected to benefit from North Korea-related business since the first half of 2018, before Lee came onto the scene, and was facing the risk of forced liquidation.
He continued, “There is substantial reason to suspect that the remittance to North Korea was an illicit transaction combining Ssangbangwool’s stock-price manipulation and efforts to avoid the risk of forced liquidation with the North’s foreign-currency earnings.” He criticized the original trial court for excluding NIS documents and other materials containing evidence of these circumstances.
The defense team again raised questions about how the accomplices had changed their statements. It argued, “Former Ssangbangwool chairman Kim Sung-tae initially stated after his extradition that he had never exchanged proposals with Lee, while Ahn Bu-soo, head of the Asia Pacific Peace Exchange Association, completely reversed his testimony in court.” It added, “The court erred by finding the statements credible based only on their ‘consistency in court testimony,’ without examining how they had changed.”
The retrial petition included numerous documents as new evidence that had not been considered during the earlier trial. Attorney Kim Hyeon-cheol said, “We submitted NIS response documents, recordings of phone calls with the prosecutor in charge of the investigation and records of appearances at the prosecutor’s office, the results of an inspection by the Ministry of Justice, recordings of meetings with the defendant, and materials from the Financial Supervisory Service.”
In particular, Kim said, “Former chairman Kim testified that in July 2019 he gave $700,000 for a trip to North Korea to North Korean agent Ri Ho-nam in Manila, Philippines. But according to NIS records, Ri Ho-nam had no record of entering the Philippines at the time and was receiving hospital treatment.” He continued, “Kim was called into the prosecutor’s office 184 times over the course of a year, but interrogation records were drawn up on only 11 days.” He argued, “Gathering accomplices and subjecting them to inducements and pressure to elicit a confession from an indicted defendant constituted unlawful abuse of prosecutorial authority and a fabricated investigation.”
The defense team indicated that it would also actively consider applying for a stay of execution of Lee’s sentence in connection with the retrial petition under the Criminal Procedure Act of the Republic of Korea.
Attorney Lee Deok-u said, “Lee has been wrongfully imprisoned for more than four years, even though he never once asked for money to be sent to North Korea.” He added, “Based on the newly submitted objective evidence, the court should swiftly decide to open a retrial and set the record straight about the substantive truth.”
The Suwon High Court plans to review whether the materials submitted by the defense team constitute “clear new evidence warranting a finding of innocence or the like,” and then make a final decision on whether to open a retrial.
[email protected] Lee Chang-hoon Reporter