The Supreme Court on May 19 imposed a fine on Park Chul, the former president of HUFS, who had been brought to trial for embezzling school funds.
The ex-president was suspected of spending about 1.2 billion won from school education funds during his term from 2006-2014 to deal with the university’s suits against its labor union, including the costs of hiring lawyers.

He was fined 10 million won from the first trial in June of last year, after which the second trial in January of this year upheld the same fine from the first trial. The judges from both trials mentioned that educational expenditures cannot be used for legal costs, and Park would have had no valid reason for not recognizing this.

Park was summarily indicted by prosecutors and fined 10 million won in 2014 after the Korean University Workers’ Union accused him of embezzlement. However, he demanded a formal trial, arguing that he was uninformed of the regulation that lawyer recruitment spending should not be disbursed from educational funds.