Lee Myung-bak

Biography

Lee Myung-bak was born in Osaka in 1941 to Korean parents, and the family returned to Pohang after 1945. He attended night school and then Korea University, where as student council president in 1964 he took part in protests against talks with Japan and spent about three months in prison.

He joined Hyundai Construction in 1965, worked on its first overseas contract in Thailand, became a company director at 29 and chief executive at 35, and was chairman from 1988. He left Hyundai in 1992 after 27 years and entered politics with the ruling Democratic Liberal Party, winning a seat in the National Assembly that year and again in 1996; he resigned in 1998 over campaign-finance violations.

As mayor of Seoul from 2002 to 2006 he restored the Cheonggyecheon stream and created Seoul Forest. He defeated Park Geun-hye for the Grand National Party nomination and won the December 2007 presidential election by a wide margin.

His presidency, from 2008 to 2013, faced mass protests in 2008 over the resumption of U.S. beef imports. He took a harder line towards North Korea, hosted the G20 summit in Seoul in 2010, promoted green-growth policies and the Four Major Rivers project, and in 2012 became the first South Korean president to visit the Liancourt Rocks. Arrested in 2018, he was convicted of bribery and embezzlement and sentenced to 17 years by the Supreme Court in 2020, but received a special pardon in December 2022.