The founder of South Korea's Daewoo Group, who had been given a lengthy jail term for his role in one of the world's largest corporate failures, was pardoned Monday under a traditional New Year amnesty.

Kim Woo-Choong, 71, founder and former chairman of the nowdefunct group, was one of 75 people to benefit from the presidential amnesty, the justice ministry said in a statement.

Several chiefs of the nation's huge conglomerates known as chaebol were sentenced to prison terms in the years following the 1997 financial crisis. But most were either pardoned or had their sentences commuted on appeal.

Daewoo had debts of 82 billion dollars when it went imder in 1999 in the wake of the financial crisis. The government was forced to spend some 30 trillion won (now 32 billion dollars) to rescue its component companies.

Kim fled the country. As the corporate meltdown unfolded he was accused of ordering his executives to inflate the group's assets between 1997 and 1998 to obtain bank loans.

After returning from exile in 2005, Kim was convicted of masterminding an accounting fraud involving 20 trillion won and borrowing 9.8 trillion won in illegal loans from banks, as well as smuggling funds overseas.