With remediation failed and court on the agenda, LG has released surveillance footage of the incident in which one of executives is accused of vandalizing washing machines produced by rival Samsung.
Jo Seong-jin, the president of LG's home appliance division, has been charged with vandalizing three Samsung washing machines at store in Berlin while visiting Germany for a trade show last year. There are two other LG officials that have been charged with willfully damaging the Samsung washers as well.
Samsung alleges that Jo and the two other LG employees broke the doors off of three of its washers. Workers at the store are said to have contacted local police to address the incident.
Jo has apologized for the spectacle the incident has caused, but he maintains his innocence in the matter. To prove his innocence and to wash the taint of the matter before it sets into the public's mind, LG says it has released the surveillance footage to absolve Jo in the court of public opinion before it's too late.
The nearly nine-minute-long video, which is narrated in Korean, depicts Jo and several LG officials inspecting a row of Samsung washers. The video also includes clips of what appear to be product testers putting weight on the doors of the Samsung washers.
"Users frequently press the door of the washing machine when they doing laundry. Testing the sturdiness of the door hinge is just ordinary process of testing the machine in that sense," Jo states in the video.
Jo argues that Samsung officials and other LG employees were nearby when he allegedly vandalized the washing machines. If he was in fact purposely damaging the machines, someone would have stepped in to stop him, Jo argues.
Despite LG producing surveillance video, Samsung still asserts that Jo and two other LG employees willfully damaged the washers at the trade show. Samsung argues that the video LG produced was edited, omitting key events of the incident.
"The prosecution has already sufficiently examined the entire video, not the edited version, and has determined that there is enough suspicion of willfully damaging, so we have decided that just because LG Electronics posted a video it would be inappropriate for us to release the entire video as tit-for-tat," states a Samsung spokesperson.
Shortly after the incident, the pair of South Korean tech companies reached a deal, with the help of German authorities, and LG agreed to pay Samsung. Samsung filed suit back home in South Korea and authorities tried to mediate the case, but issue now seems poised to move into court.
Check out the video released by LG:
