President Park Geun-hye plans to meet with South Korea’s top business leaders this week to discuss ways on how to run innovation centers, an official said Thursday.
The meeting is set to take place Friday and draw 17 business leaders, including Lee Jae-yong, the heir apparent of South Korea’s top conglomerate, Samsung Group.
Other high-profile participants include Chung Mong-koo, chairman of Hyundai Motor Group, the world’s fifth-largest carmaker, and Hanwha Group Chairman Kim Seung-yeon, according to presidential spokesman Min Kyung-wook.
The planned meeting comes two days after South Korea finished setting up 17 innovation centers across the country to nurture startups and venture firms with the assistance of conglomerates.
The move came in line with Park’s flagship policy dubbed the creative economy that calls for boosting the economy and creating jobs by turning creative ideas into real businesses through science and technology and information technology.
The planned meeting, the third of its kind, comes as business leaders have asked Park to include convicted business tycoons on the list of people to whom Park plans to grant special pardons next month.
Earlier this month, Park instructed officials to review the scope and candidates for the planned pardons to mark the 70th anniversary of Korea’s independence from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule. Liberation Day falls on Aug. 15 and marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, as well as both Koreas’ independence from Japan.
Kim, the Hanwha Group chief, is one of the convicted business leaders.
In February, an appeals court gave him a three-year sentence for illegally using company money to pay back debts of firms he ran under borrowed names. The sentence was suspended for five years, saving him from serving the jail term. (Yonhap)
