Chủ tịch Tập đoàn Samsung qua đời. Thọ 78 tuổi

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Lee Kun-hee, who built Samsung into a global giant (gã khổng lồ toàn cầu) of smartphones, televisions and computer chips but was twice convicted — and, in a pattern that has become typical in South Korea, twice pardoned — for white-collar crimes committed along the way, died on Sunday in Seoul, the South Korean capital. He was 78.

Samsung announced the death but did not specify the cause. Mr. Lee had been incapacitated (mất khả năng lao động) since a heart attack (cơn đau tim) in 2014.

...In 1996, Mr. Lee was convicted (bị kết án) of bribing the country’s president (hối lộ tổng thống), then pardoned (tha tội, tha lỗi, tha thứ). More than a decade later, he was found guilty of tax evasion (trốn thuế) but given another reprieve (ân xá, giảm tội), this time so he could resume lobbying to bring the Winter Olympics to the mountain town of Pyeongchang in 2018.

Soon after the Pyeongchang Games, Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s president from 2008 to 2013 and no relation, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for accepting $5.4 million in bribes from Samsung in exchange for pardoning Mr. Lee.

...Lee Kun-hee was born in Daegu, in Japanese-occupied Korea, on Jan. 9, 1942, to Park Doo-eul and Lee Byung-chull, who had founded Samsung a few years earlier as an exporter of fruit and dried fish. The younger Lee was a wrestler (đô vật) in high school (trường trung học).

Lee Kun-hee graduated (tốt nghiệp) from Waseda University in Tokyo in 1965.