A Seoul court has sentenced former first lady Kim Keon-hee to one year and eight months in prison for accepting bribes from the Unification Church, but acquitted her of other charges related to stock manipulation and fraudulent polls. 

Kim was indicted on charges of engaging in stock manipulation at Deutsch Motors between October 2010 and December 2012 and acquiring unfair profits totaling approximately 810 million won, or around 569-thousand U.S. dollars.

Kim also faced charges of conspiring with her husband, former President Yoon Suk Yeol, to receive favorable poll results from power broker Myung Tae-kyun, whose services as a pollster were estimated to be worth 270 million won, for free before the 2022 presidential race.

She was accused of accepting gifts worth 80 million won from the Unification Church between April and July 2022 in return for administrative favors, with a shaman known as Geon Jin acting as an intermediary. The court found her guilty of accepting some, but not all, of the gifts. 

The special counsel team in charge of the case had requested a 15-year sentence.

It is the first time in the country’s history that both a former president and their spouse have been sentenced to prison at the same time, after Yoon recently got a five-year term for obstructing an attempt to arrest him over his martial law action in late 2024.