[JURIST] A South Korean appellate court Tuesday upheld the conviction of two Samsung [corporate website] executives connected with illegal stock trading [JURIST report]. Tae-Hak Huh and Ro-Bin Park were convicted of breach of duty in 2005 for selling a controlling stake of Samsung holding company Samsung Everland [corporate website] to the son of Samsung Chairman and CEO Kun-Hee Lee [corporate profile; Wikipedia profile] for approximately half of its fair market value. Huh, Everland's former president, was given a suspended jail sentence of three years, while Park, the current president and CEO, was given a suspended jail sentence of two years. The Seoul High Court [official backgrounder] affirmed Huh's three-year sentence, and added an additional year onto Park's two-year sentence in Tuesday's ruling. The court made no judgment on whether Lee was involved with the bond sale.

Samsung has been the center of numerous legal battles in the past few years, many of which stem from criminal antitrust actions involving fixing the price of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) [Wikipedia backgrounder], affecting the cost of personal computers worldwide. Last month, a sixth Samsung executive pleaded guilty [US DOJ press release; JURIST report] to US charges of conspiring to artificially inflate DRAM costs. Samsung's $150 billion sales accounts for 17 percent of South Korea's total economic output. AFP has more.