Park's Quack Doctors Found Guilty

The Seoul Central District Court on Thursday found Park Geun-hye's beauty doctor Kim Young-jae and three others guilty of administering unsupervised treatments to the deposed president while she was in office.

It was the first ruling in the massive influence-peddling and corruption scandal that brought Park down.

The court gave Kim a three-year suspended sentence and fined him W3 million (US$1=W1,126). His wife Park Chae-yoon was sentenced to a year in prison for bribing ex-presidential secretary An Chong-bum to gain Cheong Wa Dae backing to expand her medical supplies business overseas.

The court accepted that Kim provided unsupervised medical treatments to the president and lied about it in a National Assembly hearing in December last year. But it added, "The defendant admits the crime and cooperated actively with the investigation, so his sentence will be suspended."

But the court sent his wife to jail because she "voluntarily took part in influence peddling and corruption for personal gains."

Kim Sang-man, a doctor formerly employed by the luxury Chaum clinic in Gangnam who prescribed rejuvenating injections for Park under a soap-opera alias from 2011 to 2014, was slapped with a W10 million fine.

And Chung Kee-yang, a "dermatology consultant" to Park, was sentenced to one year in prison for falsely denying in front of the National Assembly that he performed botox, filler or laser treatments on Park. The court said Chung not only lied to lawmakers but continues to deny his wrongdoings.

And Lee Im-soon, a medical professor at Sunchunhyang University, was given a two-year suspended sentence on the same charges as Chung, but she was given the lighter sentence because she admitted her wrongdoings.

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