July 19 2017
A South Korean man was convicted of laundering bribes from science and technology companies based in California and Britain. Courthouse News Service reported Tuesday that 59-year-old Heon-Cheol Chi, former director of South Korea’s Earthquake Research Center, was convicted by a jury after a four-day trial of one count of transacting in a criminally-derived property through U.S. banks, carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison. Prosecutors said that from 2009 to 2015, Chi used his center position, which is part of the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources, to solicit over one million U.S. dollars in bribes from two seismological companies.