[Anchor]

Former Gyeonggi Province Vice Governor for Peace Lee Hwa-young, currently imprisoned over the Ssangbangwool illegal North Korea remittance scandal, has filed for a retrial with the court. His legal team claims to have secured new evidence that overturns the previous court ruling that Ssangbangwool sent money to North Korea on behalf of Gyeonggi Province.

Reporter Im Jihyeon has the story.

[Reporter]

The legal team for former Gyeonggi Province Vice Governor Lee Hwa-young, who is serving time in prison in connection with the Ssangbangwool Group's unauthorized remittance to North Korea, has filed a retrial request with the Suwon High Court.

This comes one year and five months after his seven-year and eight-month prison sentence was finalized by the Supreme Court in June of last year.

A retrial is an extraordinary remedy procedure to reexamine a finalized guilty verdict when there is a significant error. This filing is limited to the violation of the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act among the charges for which he was found guilty.

The defense team argued that clear new evidence proving former Vice Governor Lee's innocence has been discovered, maintaining that the money sent to North Korea was not for Gyeonggi Province project costs or the visit to North Korea by the governor at the time, Lee Jae-myung, but rather funds paid by Ssangbangwool for its own independent business operations.

[Oh Gi-du / Defense attorney for former Vice Governor Lee Hwa-young: "There is a single core issue in this retrial request: whether the money Ssangbangwool handed over to North Korea was paid on behalf of Gyeonggi Province at the demand of former Vice Governor Lee, or not."]
As new evidence, the defense team presented National Intelligence Service documents indicating that Ri Ho-nam, a North Korean operative accused of receiving 700,000 dollars from former Ssangbangwool Chairman Kim Seong-tae in the Philippines, was not actually in the Philippines at the time, alongside transcripts involving Prosecutor Park Sang-yong and attorney Seo Min-seok, who investigated the former vice governor.
The defense team also stated that they are considering applying for a suspension of the execution of the sentence during the retrial filing process.
The court is expected to review the retrial request submitted by the former vice governor's legal representatives to decide whether to initiate retrial proceedings.
(Camera Reporter: Jang Woon-seok | Video Editor: Kim Yoon-sung | VJ: Noh Jae-min | Designer: Lee Ga-jin)