By Chris Green

What do the releases of Kim Seung-youn and Chung Mong-koo, respectively chairmen of Hanwha and Hyundai, tell us about the state of the Korean justice system?

Kim was recently at the center of one of Korea's most infamous criminal cases, duly convicted of assault and sent to prison for 18 months after admitting to undertaking a revenge attack on some men who had in turn attacked his son. His sentence was suspended on appeal.

Meanwhile Chung too had the substantial prison sentence that he incurred for a corruption conviction suspended on appeal. Why?

We are right to ask. Looking at the alternative sentences that the appeals judges have handed down in these cases, we can see that Kim is required to do community service while Chung has been told to do similar service while also donating huge amounts of Hyundai's money to a slew of charity projects. That is all. Nothing more.

The judges in these cases cited a number of frankly extraordinary reasons for so substantially weakening the sentences. First among these is that Kim, in effect, only did what any father would do.

This, needless to say, is absolute nonsense. Fathers have a natural tendency to feel protective towards their children, and if Kim had brought the full weight of the law crashing down on his son's assailants that would have been applauded by us all.

However, he did no such thing. He brought an iron bar crashing down on them in a deserted area of southern Seoul instead. In short, he did what he thought he could get away with.

That in the first place he did not get away with doing it, and was sentenced to a prison term for it, was a welcome surprise to everyone. That he should now walk free is a depressingly unsurprising outcome.

In the case of Chung, he was convicted of large-scale embezzlement and sentenced to three years in prison. The rationale for suspending that sentence last week was that the impact of such an imprisonment might have a serious negative effect on the Korean economy, as Hyundai is one of its largest contributing parts.

Ignoring the damage that an 840-billion won donation to Korean society could also do to Hyundai's economic situation, we must wonder whether Chung is so crucial to the day to day success of Hyundai that he can't be sacrificed for even a year?

If so, I fear for the long-term viability of Hyundai. Frankly, of course, this rationale is as dubious as that in the Kim case.

It is an inconvenient truth for the Korean government to swallow, but it seems that in judicial terms money still talks much louder than fairness or equality. Both these men performed criminal acts, and both these men deserve to be punished according to the laws of the land.

Both men did things that very few of us could hope, or would wish, to get away with, and the ``community service" and ``donations to the community" angle are clearly sops to keep ordinary Koreans quiet as these criminals walk free from jail.

Yet it is extraordinarily short-sighted of the judges in both cases. What Korea needs right now isn't Messrs Chung and Kim at the helms of their respective empires; it needs a good injection of faith in its business environment and its judicial system instead.

There is a very good reason why Korea ranked joint 42nd in the 2006 Transparency International corruption index, well behind such enlightened economies as that of Macao (26th) and Taiwan (35th). These recent court decisions just serve to reinforce the point.

The Financial Times recently noted that ``Korean courts appear to believe that it is in the national interest to have these industrial giants continue to run their publicly listed companies, regardless of what they might get up to behind the scenes,'' before continuing: ``Wouldn't the national interest be better served by business leaders that behaved themselves and a legal system that treated all citizens equally?'' Indeed it would.

greenman.the@gmail.com

The writer has an MA in international studies (Asia-Pacific region). His MA thesis was on the subject of inter-Korean relations under former President Kim Dae-jung's "Sunshine Policy." He currently lives in Seoul.