Do we like Lee Myung-bak?
Our score: 3 out of 10. A Supreme Court-upheld bribery and embezzlement conviction (which he denies) sits against real urban-planning good and unproven blacklist claims.
Lee Myung-bak was South Korea's president from 2008 to 2013, and before that he was mayor of Seoul. His best-loved legacy is from the mayor years: he pushed the restoration of the Cheonggyecheon stream through the middle of the capital. Years later he still talked about it as a decision to hand nature and the city back to residents.
The corruption case is the big one. He was indicted in 2018 on 16 counts, including bribery and embezzlement of company funds. A lower court found he embezzled 34.9 billion won from the auto parts firm DAS and took 8.5 billion won in bribes from Samsung Electronics, and the appeals court lifted his sentence from 15 to 17 years. The Supreme Court upheld it in October 2020. He denied all of it, said he had no connection to DAS, and declared “Korea's rule of law has collapsed.”
He didn't see it out. In December 2022 President Yoon Suk Yeol pardoned him as part of a mass pardon of 1,300-plus people, after about two years inside. The justice minister framed the pardons as being about national unity. When Lee next appeared in public he apologised for worrying the public, and in 2024 Yoon reportedly invited him to dinner.
On the harm check, the record we could verify is murky rather than damning. An intelligence-agency reform committee said the agency ran a task force against 82 left-leaning artists during his term, with TV programs shut down and tax probes launched, and that the Blue House gave direct orders. That is the agency's claim, prosecutors were only asked to investigate, and the report we read doesn't say Lee was charged over it. We found nothing from him on LGBTQ+ or trans people in these pages, so that's a gap, not a pass.
The Four Rivers project is his other contested legacy. It cost about 22 trillion won and was finished in 2011. A 2014 review under his successor found floods were prevented in 93.7 per cent of riverside areas. Then a 2018 audit under Moon Jae-in concluded the project had zero value for flood prevention. Where you land depends on whether you read the audit as science or as payback politics.
Nothing new on him lately that we could find. His latest public outing was an October 2025 talk marking 20 years of Cheonggyecheon, where he also took a swipe at the current government's cash coupon policy. That's a retired politician talking up his own best project, nothing nastier.