CEO sentenced to 1 year for failing to prevent death at industrial site

This photo shows an industrial site. (123rf)

Hankook Steel & Mill's co-Chief Executive Officer was sentenced to one year in prison Wednesday for his failure to prevent an outsourced employee's death at an industrial site.

The 69-year-old surnamed Sung, who led the company alongside Ha Jong-sik, was the first individual in South Korea to be sent to prison for the failure to ensure workplace safety.

The worker was in his 60s when he was killed in March 2022 at a Hankook Steel & Mill plant in Haman-gun, South Gyeongsang Province.

Sung was the second individual to receive criminal punishment following a separate case in April in which a chief of a building company was found guilty of the death of an outsourced worker.

A Changwon District Court judge noted in a landmark ruling that a heavy punishment was inevitable, given the structural problems of Hankook Steel & Mill in undermining the safety of their workers, adding that such accidents have repeatedly taken place at the company's industrial sites.

The court also slapped Hankook Steel & Mill with a 100 million won ($74,800) fine and handed down a suspended sentence for a business owner who directly employed the worker outsourced to the steelmaker.

In Korea, business owners or executives of a company are subject to criminal liability for a deadly workplace accident involving workers either directly or indirectly employed by the company under the Serious Accident Punishment Act, effective since January 2022.

So far, a total of 14 business owners and executives have been indicted for such failures by the prosecution.

The Korea Enterprises Federation, a lobby group representing business circles here, criticized Wednesday's ruling for "setting an extremely rigorous standard on a business owner who cannot directly supervise safety measures at industrial sites."

By Son Ji-hyoung(consnow@heraldcorp.com)