The news follows the chairman’s son Jay Y. Lee, heir to the Samsung Group, who was released from detention earlier this week after an appeals court halved his sentence for bribery and corruption to 2-1/2 years and suspended it for four years.
Following a heart attack in 2014, the elder Lee, 76, has remained hospitalised in Seoul’s Samsung Medical Centre and is difficult to communicate with, and has shown little sign of recovery. Until his imprisonment, Jay Y. Lee had been regarded as the de facto head of the group.
Police said elder Lee could not be questioned due to his physical condition and Samsung declined to comment.
“Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee and a Samsung executive managed funds in 260 bank accounts under names of 72 executives, suspected of evading taxes worth 8.2 billion won”, Korean National Police Agency said in a statement, planning to send the case to prosecutors.
Police added that the accounts were found in the course of their probe into alleged improper payments for the renovation of Lee’s family residence.
The investigation into tax evasion harks back to the late payment of tax in 2011, only 8.2 billion of that sum falls within the statute of limitations, according to police.
The graft case that led to the younger Lee’s arrest last year and brought down the former president Park Geun-hye prompted Samsung to vow to improve transparency in corporate governance and grant heads of the group’s affiliates more autonomy from the Lee family.
The group dismantled its corporate strategy office in late 2017.
The new liberal government led by President Moon Jae-in elected after the corruption scandal promised to put family-run conglomerates under stronger scrutiny and end the practice of pardoning corporate tycoons convicted of white-collar crimes. So far that has not worked very well given Jay Y Lee is already out and about after only a year.
It is not the first time the elder Lee has been investigated for tax evasion. He was convicted in 2009 and later pardoned for tax evasion after being embroiled in a scandal that also involved the use of accounts held by trusted employees.
