Supreme Court upholds one year six month prison sentence for Seungri

Seungri [YONHAP]

The Supreme Court upheld a one year and six month prison sentence for Seungri, an ex-member of boy band Big Bang, after he was found guilty of offering women for sex to potential investors, gambling overseas and embezzling money from his nightclub.

On Thursday, the court upheld a lower court’s ruling and found the 32-year-old, whose real name is Lee Seung-hyun, guilty of a total of nine charges surrounding the Burning Sun scandal, an infamous sex, drugs and police protection scandal surrounding Lee’s nightclub of the same name which shocked the K-pop industry in 2019.

He was found guilty of soliciting prostitution for investors from Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong as well as for himself from December 2015 to January 2016.

He was also found guilty of gambling up to 2.2 billion won ($1.7 million) in hotel casinos in Las Vegas from 2013 to 2017.

He was also found guilty of embezzling about 528 million won from his nightclub and mobilizing gang members to threaten customers whom he got into a fight with at a bar back in December 2015.

The court, however, overturned the lower court’s decision to hit Seungri with a fine of $1 million for his overseas gambling.

In August 2021, a military court handed Lee a three-year prison term as he was serving his mandatory military service at the time. He was immediately sent to army prison. However, a higher military court reduced his sentence to one year and six months.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]