SEOUL (Reuters) – Samsung Electronics Vice President Jay Y. Lee hosted U. S. President Joe Biden at a semiconductor plant in South Korea after he was barred from attending a trial hearing for accounting fraud on Friday, a court spokesman said.
Lee noted that he was accompanying Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol as the two heads of state met at the world’s largest semiconductor factory in the city of Pyeongtaek, about 50 km (30 miles) from Seoul.
Samsung’s chip production complex in Pyeongtaek, which spans 2. 89 million meters or the length of 400 football fields, has two production lines for DRAM and NAND flash memory chips, as well as contract chip production, and a third line that will be completed this year.
The third production line, called P3, which Biden visited, will be the largest of the three and is expected to produce 14-nanometer DRAM chips used in servers and generation devices such as 5-nanometer logic chips.
Lee noticed that he was explaining the site to the U. S. Secretary of Commerce. U. S. Secretary of State Gina Raimondo saw Biden being briefed through workers dressed in blue protective gears on the factory floor, live footage showed.
Since Lee was released on parole, Samsung has taken important steps, such as opting for Taylor, Texas, as the U. S. site. The U. S. Department of Commerce for its new $17 billion chip factory, merging its customer electronics and cellular divisions, and appointing new co-CEOs in its biggest reorganization since 2017.
Lee’s absence from court is a rare event. For more than a year, he has attended all hearings in a separate trial in which he is accused of accounting fraud similar to the $8 billion merger of two Samsungs in 2015, according to court records.
Although the presence of the defendant is required to ensure his right to protect himself, the Seoul Central District Court agreed to Lee’s request not to attend Friday’s hearing because witness testimony can be recorded, the court spokesman said.
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