Prosecutors sought a 10-year prison sentence Thursday for the head of a mine developer charged with reaping massive profits from a stock price rigging scam linked to a diamond mining project in Cameroon.
   
CNK International President Oh Deok-gyun, 48, was indicted in April for pocketing about 90 billion won (US$81 million) by exaggerating the volume of diamond reserves in a Cameroon mine through a press release in 2010.
  

 He was additionally charged with committing malpractice that cost the company 11 billion won and violating the Foreign Exchange Transaction Act against Oh.
  
Put out by the South Korean foreign ministry in December 2010, the press release claimed the company won a project near the southeastern Cameroon town of Yokodouma to mine about 420 million carats of diamonds, or 2.5 times the annual global production at the time, prosecutors said.
  
The news sent CNK shares jumping more than fivefold in the first three weeks from about 3,000 won apiece to 16,100 won.
  
The mine, however, was later found to hold only 6 percent of the claimed reserves. The project was eventually handed over to a Chinese company.
  
In a final hearing held at the Seoul Central District Court, prosecutors also called for a penalty of 6.9 billion won on the businessman.
   
"Oh continues to lie to his investors by telling them everything will be solved after this ruling," a prosecutor in charge of the case said. "Yet, his company had completely lost its profit structure after the Cameroon project fizzled."
  

Another defendant in the case -- Kim Eun-seok, the former Energy and Resources ambassador at the foreign ministry -- should be imprisoned for five years for colluding with Oh, he added.
   
"Kim could have easily found out about the exaggeration, but he listed the false information in a foreign ministry press release without proper fact-checking," the prosecutor said. (Yonhap)