Arrested after evading 65 billion won fine, man faces ‘emperor’s labor’ worth nearly 600 million won a day

A man who avoided South Korea’s largest recorded unpaid fine for about seven years has been arrested, but the legal penalty awaiting him may produce an extraordinary daily labor value.

The Seoul Western District Prosecutors’ Office arrested the man, identified only by his surname initial, at a hideout on the 21st of last month. Prosecutors said he had failed to pay a fine of 653.7 billion won, the highest amount recorded in an unpaid-fine case.

The man allegedly served as the transport chief of a smuggling group that concealed Hong Kong gold bars on travelers and moved them to Japan through airport transit areas. The operation reportedly ran from July 2015 to December 2016 and generated more than 40 billion won in market gains.

A trial court sentenced him in 2019 to two years and six months in prison and a fine of 1.3 trillion won. An appeals court later reduced the sentence to one year and four months and cut the fine to 662.3 billion won. After completing his prison term, he was released and disappeared without paying.

The prosecution’s enforcement team reviewed the case records and tracked people around him before finding him in hiding. He reportedly refused to pay and went directly to prison. Under South Korea’s Criminal Act, people who fail to pay fines of at least 5 billion won can face between 1,000 days and three years of labor detention. Even at the maximum period, the scale of his unpaid fine means each day of labor would be valued at nearly 600 million won, a result often described in South Korea as “emperor’s labor.”