By Lee Tae-hoon
A court has sentenced two senior officials of Arirang TV to prison terms on charges of embezzlement, officials of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office said Sunday.
Prosecutors indicted them in November for siphoning off 250 million won ($220,000) and 67 million won respectively, by diverting employees’ wages into bank accounts belonging to people who had never worked for the state-run broadcaster.
“The two claimed that it was common practice for the employees of the company to inflate production costs,” Shin Woo-jeong, a judge at the Seoul Central District Court, said as he handed down sentences of six months and 10 months in prison, respectively.
“Stealing taxpayers’ money cannot be justified especially with the excuse that it was a prevalent practice.”
The Korea Times first broke the news of Arirang TV officials’ misappropriation of the company money on Jan. 7, 2011 under the title “Arirang TV under probe for possible embezzlement.”
One of them was found to have coerced a subordinates cook the books and pay certain freelance workers as little as half of the proper wages.
Arirang officials say it was difficult for the English-language channel to locate bogus bank accounts created by the two officials due to the frequent changes in staff members, many of whom are Koreans brought up overseas and prefer to be referred to by their English names, rather than their official Korean names.