On the 26th, it was learned that Jang Young-ja, who carried out a 640 billion won bills fraud in the 1980s, filed for a retrial with the Supreme Court over the "15 billion won forged check case," for which she received her fifth prison sentence.
Jang filed a petition for retrial in this case with the Supreme Court on Apr. 8. The case was assigned to the Supreme Court's Third Division. The presiding justice is Justice Oh Seok-jun. However, the retrial has not yet been opened. The Supreme Court is currently reviewing whether to open a retrial in this case.
In May 2021, Jang was brought to trial on charges of signing an agricultural products supply contract with A, the head of an agricultural products company, in Jul. 2017 and handing over forged checks worth 15.42 billion won as an advance payment.
In the first trial, the court acquitted Jang in Dec. 2022, saying it was hard to find that she used the checks knowing they were forged. However, in Jan., the appellate court sentenced Jang to one year in prison and took her into custody in court. The appellate court said, "The amount on the forged checks is the same as in another case where Jang was convicted in the past, and the serial numbers on the checks are consecutive," adding, "The method of the crime is similar, so there is no way Jang did not know they were forged checks."
Jang appealed, but the Supreme Court dismissed her appeal in Mar., finding no issue with the appellate court's judgment. As a result, the one-year prison sentence was finalized, and Jang is now in her eighth month of serving time.
Meanwhile, this is the fifth time Jang has received a prison sentence. In 1982, Jang was sentenced to 15 years in prison for a 640.4 billion won bills fraud she committed with her husband and was paroled in 1992 with five years left on her term.
After that, she was imprisoned several times for frauds worth tens of billions of won. In 1994, one year and 10 months after her first release, she was sentenced to four years in prison and taken into custody for a 14 billion won loan fraud, then was released again in 1998 under a Liberation Day special pardon.
Jang was again taken into custody in 2000 for an old-issue currency fraud worth around 22 billion won and served 15 years. Also, Jang, who stood trial on charges of deceiving acquaintances in 2015 by saying she needed expense to donate Samsung Everland convertible bonds in the name of her late husband and embezzling 600 million won, had her four-year prison sentence finalized by the Supreme Court in 2020 and was released at the end of her term in early 2022.