A full-scale court hearing on the ‘Seongnam FC Sponsorship Suspicion’ case has begun, more than a year after the prosecution’s first indictment.
“We have waited six months since the prosecution’s initial indictment, and many of the defense lawyers have not even submitted their evidence,” said the presiding judge at the first trial of the case, held at the 토토 Seongnam District Court’s Seongnam Support First Criminal Division Deputy Chief Judge Kang Dong-won on Friday. “Since we have waited long enough, we will complete three rounds of pretrial proceedings today, followed by the trial.”
Prosecutors first indicted two people, a former Seongnam City official and a former head of Doosan Engineering & Construction, in connection with the allegations in September last year, and then in March this year indicted eight more, including Lee Jae-myung, the then mayor of Seongnam City, Chung Jin-sang, the former head of the party’s presidential office, and former executives from Naver and Doosan.
Of the 10 defendants, Lee and Chung will be tried in the Seoul Central District Court, where they were indicted together on charges of favoritism in Daejeon, while the other eight defendants will be tried in the Seongnam District Court.
The first hearing of the day, which was held after the additional indictments were merged, ended after one hour and 30 minutes, with only the defendants’ voir dire (identification), the prosecution’s summary of the case, and the defense’s presentation of its case.
The defense lawyers for the seven defendants, including former executives of NAVER and Doosan Engineering & Construction, former officials of Seongnam City, and the former president of Seongnam FC, all stated that they “categorically deny the prosecution’s charges.”
Some of the defense lawyers pointed out that the prosecution’s indictment contained too much detail about the entirety of the facts, which violates the “indictment Japaneseism.
This is the principle that when prosecutors file an indictment, they should only submit the indictment to the court and not attach other documents and evidence to the indictment.
On the other hand, Ms. Park Mo, a former executive of Seongnam FC, who was indicted for allegedly having her employees make donations during the party’s presidential contest (a violation of the Political Funds Act), admitted to the indictment through her defense attorney.
The court decided to close the defense against Ms. Park accordingly.
The Trial Chamber also decided to decide which of the issues related to Doosan E&C, Naver, and Cha Hospital will be heard first in the trial scheduled for November.
The tribunal asked the defense to submit all of its witnesses by the next deadline.
The next session of the trial will be held on October 31 at 2:00 pm.
Subsequent hearings with witnesses will be held on November 30 at 1:30 p.m. and December 21 at 1:30 p.m.