“Back in the day,” said Lim Hyung-kyu, a retired Samsung Electronics executive now in his 70s, “my weeks were Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday, Friday,” the New York Times reported Mr. Lim joined Samsung, South Korea’s largest company, in 1976 and rose through the ranks to chief technology officer. For much of his 30-plus years at Samsung, working on the weekends was normal — and legal under the nation’s labor laws. “I didn’t mind,” Mr. Lim said. “It was fun for me.” Things are different now.

South Korea’s headline inflation picked up at a stronger-than-expected pace in July, reaccelerating due to higher prices for agricultural and oil products, after easing for three consecutive months, the Wall Street Journal reported. The benchmark consumer-price index rose 2.6% from a year earlier, following a 2.4% gain in June, the country’s statistics office said Friday. Compared with the prior month, the index rose 0.3% in July compared with the median forecast of a 0.2% increase. In June, it fell 0.2% from the previous month.

A Montenegrin appeals court on Thursday upheld a ruling by a lower court to hand over a South Korean mogul known as “the cryptocurrency king” to his native country, rejecting a bid to extradite him to the United States, the Associated Press reported. The move follows a months-long legal saga in the case of Do Kwon, the Terraform Labs founder who was arrested in Montenegro last year. Both South Korea and the U.S. had requested Do Kwon’s extradition from Montenegro. Various Montenegrin courts in the past months have brought and overturned multiple rulings to extradite Kwon either to U.S.

TMON started offering belated refunds to customers, Friday, after more than a thousand enraged consumers flocked to the headquarters of the cash-strapped e-commerce platform, the Korea Times reported. This came shortly after WeMakePrice, another online shopping platform mired in a similar liquidity crisis, initiated refunds the day before. Early this week, concerns about the potential insolvency of both firms emerged when their sellers abandoned the platforms due to delayed payments.

South Korea’s economy slowed at a sharper-than-expected pace in the second quarter on sluggish private consumption and weak business investments, losing steam after a solid recovery in the previous quarter, the Wall Street Journal reported. Gross domestic product in Asia’s fourth-largest economy expanded 2.3% year-over-year during the April-June period, slower than the prior quarter’s revised 3.3% growth, Bank of Korea preliminary data showed Thursday. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, the economy shrank 0.2% following the first quarter’s 1.3% expansion, according to the central bank.

South Korean prosecutors said Tuesday they have arrested the founder of technology giant Kakao Corp. for alleged stock price rigging during his company’s takeover of a major K-pop agency last year, the Associated Press reported. Kim’s arrest came after the Seoul Southern District Court approved an arrest warrant, citing concerns that he could flee or destroy evidence. Prosecutors have up to 20 days to investigate Kim and determine whether to indict him, according to a senior prosecutor at a Seoul district prosecutors’ office. He requested anonymity because an investigation was under way.

South Korea’s central bank held its base rate steady in a move that was widely anticipated but came alongside growing expectations that it could be gearing up to pivot toward policy easing in the coming months. The Bank of Korea on Thursday left its benchmark seven-day repurchase rate unchanged at a 15-year high of 3.50% for a 12th straight time—the longest such streak ever.

A solar panel maker in Georgia that has booked $230 million in federal tax credits stands to collect hundreds of millions more as it pursues plans to create the first end-to-end solar manufacturing chain in the US, easing reliance on China and related concerns about the use of forced labor, Bloomberg News reported. But at least through the end of this year, the Qcells solar plant, which South Korea’s Hanwha Solutions Corp. opened in Dalton, Georgia, in 2019 and almost doubled in capacity last year, is making panels with base components from China.

Ten national university hospitals lost an estimated 1.26 trillion won ($912 million) in medical revenue from February to May, during the peak of the government-doctor conflict over the medical school enrollment quota increase, Korea Biomed reported. The situation is so dire that some insiders claim the bankruptcy crisis for national university hospitals is now a reality. Rep. Han Ji-a of the ruling People Power Party (PPP) said so after analyzing the data submitted by national university hospitals.

The Korean owners of one of Frankfurt’s best known skyscrapers failed to agree a restructuring plan for a loan tied to the building, paving the way for insolvency proceedings, Bloomberg News reported. A fund managed by IGIS Asset Management confirmed the event of default for the debt linked to Trianon tower in Germany’s financial capital.