SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea's Supreme Court on Thursday handed a suspended prison sentence to a former lawmaker who was found guilty of embezzling funds while leading a group supporting Korean survivors of Japan's wartime sexual slavery.
Yoon Meehyang, who was also convicted of fraudulently receiving government subsidies and unlawfully collecting donations, didn't attend the verdict, which confirmed a lower court's sentence of a year and six months in prison, suspended for three years.
In a statement on Facebook, Yoon described her conviction as ''unjust,'' saying she and her colleagues handled the group's funds properly and ''had not pursued private interests.''
Yoon's group, the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, said it plans to return the government subsidies linked to the fraud charges but criticized the court for failing to see the ''substantive truth.''
''Despite our efforts over the past four years, we failed to achieve a ‘not guilty' result with the Supreme Court, but I want to use this opportunity to say once again — my colleagues and I are innocent,'' Yoon wrote.
Controversy surrounding Yoon and her group erupted in 2020 when one of the slavery victims, Lee Yong-soo, accused her of misusing donations and other funds and spending little on the victims.
Yoon, who had just begun her term as a lawmaker for the liberal opposition Democratic Party, denied allegations that she and the group used the funds for private gain and insisted that Lee's claim was based on a misunderstanding.
Historians say tens of thousands of women from around Asia, many of them Korean, were sent to front-line military brothels to provide sexual services for Japanese soldiers. Hundreds were registered with the South Korean government as victims but only eight of them are still alive.
